Android has 47% Smart Phone Share

Some 97.9 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in December, representing 40 percent of all mobile subscribers.

Google Android ranked as the top smartphone platform with 47.3 percent market share, up 0.5 percentage points from September 2011.

Apple maintained its number-two position, growing 2.2 percentage points to 29.6 percent of the smartphone market. RIM ranked third with 16 percent share, followed by Microsoft (4.7 percent) and Symbian (1.4 percent). U.S. smart phone share


Globally, smart phone ownership is even higher, at perhaps 55 percent of users. 

"Less is More" Where it Comes to Smart Phones

Some might argue there are "too many" phones being made available by device manufacturers, to the extent that what people might want are a couple of "hero" devices from each leading supplier. In other words, people might prefer to choose from a smaller number of "hero" devices that have lots of features a single consumer might want, but the few that a consumer really values.

Think of that as the "cable TV" model, where lots of channels are available, most of which any single viewer never watches. But there are a relative handful of channels, perhaps seven or so, that get watched frequently.

You might argue that is precisely what Apple has been doing.

Compete’s second quarter 2011 survey of consumers suggested that "a phone with more features" was the most popular primary reason to begin the shopping process. Perhaps more significantly, for an average consumer, the “must have” list of features included 10 features beyond the obvious ability to make calls and send text messages.

About 70 percent of shoppers only considered one or two phone models during their entire research process, suggesting that consumers want more features in one phone rather than model variety. “Less” is “more”

Tucows Launches Ting Mobile Service: You Might Ask Why

Ting is a new mobile virtual network operator launched by Tucows. You might wonder why Tucows thinks there is room in the consumer and small business markets for yet another mobile service provider.

As with many offerings these days, the value might largely be indirect, much as triple play or quadruple play offers in the broader telecom space have increased the perceived value of a sales proposition and then reduce churn as well.

Ting is marketed as a way for families and multiple-user small businesses to save money, without requiring contracts and without high overage fees. As is typical with any MVNO, Ting will not carry the full selection of devices a postpaid service provider will support.

But Ting says it wants to be a simple utility, selling consumers minutes, megabytes and texts on a fair, usage-based basis.

The Ting usage plans seem to show that users who talk and text a lot, but use mobile Internet lightly, will save the most money. Heavy Internet users might, or might not, save money. People able to take advantage of a group plan might likewise find they can save money.

It argues that device subsidies, with the required service contracts, actually are simply a form of financing made by the service provider to the end user, and that users are better off simply buying their devices, without the financing.

At the moment, Ting features Android smart phones, including the

• Motorola Photon 4G
• Samsung Conquer 4G
• HTC Detail
• LG Optimus S
• Samsung Transform

Ting also offers two feature phones, the Samsung Reclaim and Samsung M360.

Tucows seems to be pitching the plans to small business owners and families, as much as individual users. The Sprint network powers the service.

The big upside here might be for Tucows distribution partners, who now would have a mobile service to offer their business customers.

That isn’t to say there is lots of profit margin here, either for Tucows or the Tucows distributors. But mobile service is such a big part of business spending these days that a Tucows channel partner might find the mobile offering is an important sales tool and a churn reducer, more than a revenue or profit driver.

Cloud-Based Voice Apps Cut Churn, fonYou Says

Since March of 2011, Telefónica has been using fonYou to provide its mobile users access to a second number, visual voicemail, call registers and advanced call screening.

The cloud player has developed a range of services that it seeks to white label to carriers as a competitive defence against the rise of over the top players, at least in the area of voice-related services. FonYou does have its own MVNO in Spain, which is hosted by Telefónica, although a spokesman said that this D2C offering is “not promoted heavily” and is “treated as a testbed and a showcase for what the services can do.

The cloud app developer claims mobile service providers can reduce churn by as much as 50 percent according to data from fonYou Telecom, the company’s own retail mobile service.

With almost 500,000 customers now using fonYou services across three networks, the operator has been able to track user behavior and compare churn rates against industry norms as well as look at changes in average revenue per user.

Examining figures from the last six months, fonYou CEO Fernando Nunez Mendoza says cloud-based second line service, the adoption of cloud storage and service management tools both reduces churn and increases ARPU.

“We have found churn reduction is at its greatest among the younger contract customers, with rates among those in the 25 to 30 age group falling by as much as 50 percent,” he said.

The firm’s data shows that churn was reduced across all customer groups by between 20 percent and 50 percent with an average reduction of around 30 per cent.

Furthermore, in terms of increased ARPU, fonYou said that customers using the company’s cloud-based services make as many as 35 additional calls each month.

“Again there are variations regarding the different types of contract,” said Mendoza, “but from the numbers we are seeing, it would be reasonable to assume an average ARPU increase of more than two Euros, per customer per month.”

fonYou now provides cloud telephony services in Spain and South Africa. In Spain the company has its own Virtual Mobile Network and also provides a second line service to Telefonica for the Movistar network that can be downloaded as an App from the App stores or activated through traditional channels on any type of handset. In South Africa, fonYou’s platform is used to drive mobile network operator Cell-C’s MyTools service which provides a range of cloud-based services to the operator’s customers.

How Big is Hosted IP Telephony Business?

Shoretel is acquiring hosted IP telephony provider M5 Networks, allowing Shoretel to offer its potential customers either hosted or premises-based business voice services.

A recent report by Gartner shows the IP voice-as-a-service market growing at a 36 percent compound annual growth rate in North America through 2015 to $2.2 billion.

That is worth putting in perspective. By 2015, total U.S. telecom industry revenue might be $337 billion. If that turns out to br correct, and the Gartner forecast also proves substantially correct, then hosted IP telephony would represent less than six tenths of one percent of U.S. industry revenue, being generous.

Keep in mind that the Gartner forecast is for all of North America, so Canadian revenues would have to be backed out of the $2.2 billion figure. 

That makes hosted IP telephony an important revenue stream for some providers, but insignificant from an industry-wide perspective. To a large extent, hosted IP telephony is a product of high relevance for firms that sell to small and mid-sized businesses, with some partial-deployment use cases for enterprises.

On the other hand, one frequently has to separate out the various components of IP telephony spending by enterprises and smaller businesses, as a good portion of the IP voice business consists of spending on access services such as SIP trunking or managed PBX services, not just "hosted IP telephony," as this chart from Infonetics suggests. 

The other caveat is that sometimes unified communications is used to describe revenues that might legitimately be called either "unified communications" or "hosted IP telephony." In fact, though gross revenues might be increasing, the percentage of total spending by businesses on hosted IP telephony might shrink, as a percentage of total, between now and 2015 or 2016. 

Here's Why "Mobile First" is a Foundational Element of Business Strategy

Mobile revenue is about 4.5 times bigger than fixed network revenue, and it has been that way for several years. In a literal sense, the global telecommunications business has become a largely mobile business, with some important fixed line applications and revenue sources. 


"Mobile first" therefore has become the important element of strategy for a growing number of application providers better known for their PC-based features and use cases. 

Visa Europe to Test Dongle-Based iPhone NFC Mobile :Payments

Visa Europe surveyed 4,200 people in four different European nations and found that 57 percent of iPhone users among the respondents said they'd "definitely" or "probably" use Visa's mobile payments platform on their iPhone if they could. 


Some 41 percent of all respondents reported they would likely use near field communications and mobile payments if possible.


Visa has drawn the logical inference: that European Apple iPhone users should be targeted. How, you might ask, since the  iPhone does not yet support NFC? There always are work-around processes in the mobile payment business. 


One way is to outfit a standard iPhone with an NFC-supporting dongle, much as Square turns an iPhone into a payment terminal using a dongle. 


Visa appears to be readying a test using the Wireless Dynamics iCarte. Retailer point of sale terrminals also will need to be outfitted for NFC, but also can use a dongle approach. 


Some of us have mused that Apple could be a huge force in the mobile payments business if it wanted to "transform" payments the way it routinely expects to transform other businesses. The barrier, of course, is that Apple prefers to transform consumer industries that are based on use of devices. 


Mobile payments does not appear to offer much upside in that regard, as Apple already leads the smart phone business. That means mobile payments is just a feature, not the foundation for a whole new class of consumer devices. 


But Visa already seems eager to test a theory about the value of an app using the iPhone as a hardware platform. Visa does not lack for clarity about what it means for its own business.