Verizon Second Quarter Results: 63% of Revenue is From Wireless

Over the last year, Verizon wireline voice revenue has dropped from 17 percent of total revenue to 14 percent. Wireless revenue grew to 63 percent of total revenue, up from 61 percent a year ago. FiOS services, which includes some voice contribution, contributes 14 percent of total revenue, up from 13 percent a year ago. Read more here.

As was the case for AT&T, fixed line broadband service revenue was up substantially, growing 21 percent, year over year. FiOS-based revenues now represent 57 percent of total fixed-line consumer revenues.

But one might wonder, given the huge investment Verizon has made in FiOS, compared to its huge profile in wireless, how valuable that investment has been. Nobody would question the need to have made the broadband upgrade, though some might still wonder whether another,less expensive design would have been sufficient. The contrary view is that Verizon might have done less well had it chosen not to upgrade to a full fiber-to-home network.

And some will argue the upside lies in the future, as bandwidth demands continue to increase. But cannot escape notice that AT&T gets half its revenue from wireless, while Verizon gets 63 percent from wireless. As policymakers continue to urge service providers to invest more, the question of financial return looms especially large.

Fixed-line network revenue continues to drop as a percentage of total, for both AT&T and Verizon. That is not the environment most conducive to the notion of aggressive investment.

Is It a "Tablet" Market or an "iPad" Market?

Strategy Analytics says last-quarter tablet shipments (quarter ending June 2011) topped 15.1 million units, a material increase over the 3.5 million units from the year-ago period. Apple remained in the number-one slot with 9.25 million iPads sold, representing a 61 percent share of the tablet market overall.

At the same time, Android tablets have gone from 2.9 percent market share in June 2010 to 30.1 percent in June 2011, a 27 percentage point increase based on sales of 4.55 million units. In the year-ago quarter Apple enjoyed a 94 percent share. The issue, over the longer term, is whether the relevant market is "tablets" or "iPads." It isn't a rhetorical question. The "MP3 market" is not nearly as accurate description of the portable music player market as "the iPod market," some would argue.

What every other supplier than Apple has to worry about is some similar development in the tablet market. Things will change, but at the moment some observers would ask why a user should buy an Android device instead of an iPad. "Because it costs less" would be a reasonable answer, but is not generally the case today. Likewise, application richness currently favors iPad, not the Android ecosystem.

Android tablets grab 30 percent of the market, but iPad still doubles that

iPad Trouncing Android in Enterprise

According to Good Technology, which provides mobile device management services to 49 of the Fortune 100 and 182 of the Fortune 500, 27 percent of the mobile devices activated by its enterprise customers during the second quarter of 2011 were tablets. And most of those were iPads.

iPad Trouncing Android in Enterprise

$16 Billion U.S. Small Business Voice Spending in 2015

By many estimates, U.S. businesses with five to 99 employees account for around half the U.S. gross domestic product and more than half the employment. So it is not surprising that In-Stat estimates, by 2015, small business spending on wireline voice services will approach $16 billion, which represents nearly 50 percent of all spending in the category.

“Wireline voice, although not growing in any significant way, is holding steady across all sizes of business,” says Greg Potter. It appears that access services will fare better than international long distance, though. “One service segment we see that could be vulnerable due to alternative technologies like VoIP, is international long distance services. Even though the total dollar spend remains high, we see negative growth over the forecast period.”

In small business, the hospitality and food vertical will spend the most on wireline voice services, reaching $2 billion by 2012. Total toll-free service expenditures will increase by $134 million over the five-year forecast period.

Enterprise spending in the government segment will reach $4.7 billion by 2015. Small offices and small offices also will spend $267 million on other services in 2015, which includes audio-conferencing services, outbound calling services, and pre-paid calling.

In-Stat

Mobile Auto Site Visits Up 465% Last 12 Months, Says Jumptap

While visitors to online auto sites are growing at 30 percent year over year, visitors to mobile auto sites have grown 463 percent, more than 15 times the rate of growth for online visitation, a new study by Jumptap has found.

The research showed that those visiting mobile auto content sites were more likely to own a tablet than the overall mobile population, and also much more likely to own a smart phone. A full 69 percent of visitors accessing mobile auto sites are using smart phones.

Jumptap Auto Research Shows Mobile Devices Growing 15 Times Faster Than Online

Do Mobiles Help Market Researchers, or Not?

Is mobile research, especially smart phone research, going to rescue market research and present us with a panoply of new options, or is it destined to be a niche player? Offering their views in this webinar are:

Michael Alioto, Vice President, Marketing Sciences, Gongos Research
Reg Baker, COO, Market Strategies International
Leonard Murphy, Editor-in-Chief, GreenBook Blog
Ray Poynter, author of the Handbook of Online & Social Media Research

Mobile Research

Twitter is all about real-time commerce?

"Twitter wants to be “the world in your pocket,” according to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, but more than anything, it wants to be the engine of mobile and real-time commerce in your pocket. The company sees a future in “removing friction” from e-commerce and allowing companies to target their users directly in real time.

That needs a little "unpacking." When a social network talks about enabling e-commerce, it means use of the Twitter platform as a way of delivering offers to potential customers.

The Twitter CEO said that the company sees a number of opportunities when it comes to enabling — and taking a share of the revenue from — direct e-commerce with users via the service, because “we already see a tremendous amount of commerce taking place on the platform.”

As an example, Costolo talked about how Google tweeted a promotion code that people could use for tickets to its recent IO conference, and about 100 tickets sold in a little over 10 minutes. “That’s $55,000 with one tweet in 13 minutes,” said the Twitter CEO. In another example, the San Diego Chargers tweeted about tickets that were left for a game, and in a little over half an hour they were gone. The upshot of all of that, he said, is that “there’s a commerce opportunity there for us to take advantage of if we want.”

Twitter is all about real-time commerce, says CEO Dick Costolo