Sprint Announce Evo 4G LTE Is Coming May 18; But LTE Network Isn't Active, Yet

The HTC Evo 4G LTE, a device branded as the "One" on other mobile networks, will launch on May 18, 2012. Here's the issue some will need to know: Sprint's Long Term Evolution network isn't built yet. Sprint is aiming for activation in 2013, for a "majority" of its sites. It is probable that six metro areas might get LTE service sometime in 2012,though.

The device, don't get me wrong, will delight many people who use it, as the earlier generations of HTC Evos have. The kickstand is really useful, for example. But there will be no LTE access for a while.

Deutsche Telekom Has No Really Great Options for T-Mobile USA

Deutsche Telekom AG is discussing a merger of its T-Mobile USA business with MetroPCS Communications, Bloomberg reports. In an ideal world, that wouldn't be DT's first choice, which was exiting the U.S. market by selling all its assets to AT&T. A second option, despite its operational and technological difficulties, might have been a combination of some sort with Sprint.

That would have combined the number-three and number-four firms, in terms of market share, despite many obvious network issues, namely the legacy air interfaces. But both Sprint and T-Mobile USA were committed already to Long Term Evolution, which would effectively resolve the air interface problems with the legacy networks each company operates.

Nobody seems to think such a deal would be approved by the Justice Department, though. All that really leaves is a combination with a smaller, regional carrier that doesn't disturb the existing top of the market too much.

There are some strategy issues to be faced. T-Mobile USA is trying to position as a brand more businesses can buy, though it has been effectively positioned recently as a brand for consumer "hipsters."

Combining with a brand known for lower-cost consumer offers therefore would pose some issues in terms of customer segmentation.

Deutsche Telekom is considering a stock-swap transaction that would give the German company control over the combined entity.

In Case You Were Wondering About Why People Find Social Media So Engaging...

The reason that Facebook, Twitter and other social media are so popular and addictive is that they pleasantly stimulate the same part of the brain as when people eat food, get money or have sex, according to a  study conducted by researchers at Harvard University.

The researchers found that people simply like to talk about themselves and social media outlets provide a very effective way to do that.

Big Content Brands Get Heavy Use on Smart Phones, So Do Their Apps

Virtually all of the top sites visited by users on smart phones used an app as the gateway, and virtually all were big and obviously popular content sites. 


Among smartphone users age 18 and older accessing the sites from iOS, Android and RIM smart phones, Google Sites ranked as the top property with nearly 94 million unique visitors, representing 96.9 percent of the mobile audience. 


Facebook ranked second with 78.0 million visitors (80.4 percent reach), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 66.2 million visitors (68.2 percent reach) and Amazon Sites 44.0 million visitors (45.4 percent reach).


Analysis of the share of time spent across apps and browsers revealed that even though these access methods had similar audience sizes, apps drove the lion’s share of engagement, representing 80 percent of the mobile media minutes, comScore says. 

Top Smartphone Properties by Total Unique Visitors (Mobile Browser and App Audience Combined) March 2012 Total U.S. Smartphone Subscribers Age 18+ on iOS, Android and RIM Platforms Source: comScore Mobile Metrix 2.0
	Audience		Engagement
	Total Unique Visitors (000)	% Reach	Browser % Share of Total Time Spent	App % Share of Total Time Spent
Total Audience (Browsing and Application combined)	97,007	100.0%	18.5%	81.5%
Google Sites	93,954	96.9%	18.9%	81.1%
Facebook	78,002	80.4%	20.0%	80.0%
Yahoo! Sites	66,185	68.2%	25.3%	74.7%
Amazon Sites	44,028	45.4%	14.3%	85.7%
Wikimedia Foundation Sites	39,073	40.3%	99.8%	0.2%
Apple Inc.	38,309	39.5%	0.3%	99.7%
Cooliris, Inc	28,543	29.4%	0.0%	100.0%
AOL, Inc.	28,021	28.9%	47.4%	52.6%
eBay	27,190	28.0%	17.6%	82.4%
Zynga	26,619	27.4%	0.4%	99.6%
Twitter	25,593	26.4%	3.5%	96.5%
Rovio (Angry Birds)	25,057	25.8%	3.7%	96.3%
Weather Channel, The	24,131	24.9%	47.1%	52.9%
Microsoft Sites	23,938	24.7%	82.1%	17.9%
ESPN	23,317	24.0%	56.8%	43.2%

Telefónica Launches Tu Me, Goes "Over the Top" in a Big Way

Telefónica Digital, the global business unit, has launched a new over-the-top mobile app called Tu Me that essentially represents that mobile service provider's effort to compete head-to-head with other over-the-top apps such as Whatsapp, which has been steadily cannibalizing service provider messaging revenue of late.


The app is currently available only for iOS devices, but an Android version is on the way. 


The new app is not Telefónica's first foray into over-the-top mobile VoIP, but it is the first time Telefónica has launched a product globally, including markets in which it does not operate a mobile service.

The global launch makes Telefónica one of the first tier-one mobile service providers to embrace an over-the-top VoIP and messaging application of its own, for global use. 

There being only two fundamental strategies a mobile service provider can take to over the top competition, namely embrace or resist, Telefónica is a bit of a pioneer in taking the "embrace it" route. 

The obvious implication is that, over time, more revenue from legacy voice and messaging operations will evaporate, leaving mobile service providers to create other new revenue streams, which might, or might not, involve embracing OTT services in some way. 

The bottom line is the bottom line. The main reason mobile and fixed network service providers dislike OTT has nothing to do with the technology. OTT cannibalizes existing revenue: that's the real problem.

What should not be forgotten is that where OTT actually enables new revenue streams in new product lines, it is a positive. That doesn't mean any particular service provider should embrace OTT voice or messaging in ways that directly and immediately diminish its important legacy revenue.

On the other hand, neither should some service providers avoid OTT, either. The issue is how to finesse the transition. Telefónica seems to have concluded that it has to be more "proactive." In part, the justification is that the new OTT approaches will create new opportunities to compete out of region. That is key.

Mobile share of Web Traffic Soon Will Eclipse Fixed Network Traffic in Many Countries

In several countries around the world, mobile Web traffic is close to overtaking Web traffic from computers, an analysis by Pingdom finds. That finding simply underscores the primacy of all forms of mobile communications, content consumption and transactions in developing regions around the world. 


Right now, the countries with the highest share of mobile traffic as part of total web traffic are:


48.87% – India
47.09% – Zambia
44.95% – Sudan
42.36% – Uzbekistan
40.65% – Nigeria
37.95% – Zimbabwe
35.46% – Laos
34.66% – Brunei
31.79% – Ethiopia
29.2% – Kenya

Is Your Mobile Product Providing 10x Better User Experience? If Not, Odds of Failure are High

One rule of thumb used by venture capital investors when assessing technology firms is to look for an order of magnitude better user experience. That rule sometimes is expressed as an order of magnitude better technology performance.

Using that measuring stick, one might argue that, whatever the initial expectations, magazine and newspaper experiences with mobile apps for smart phones and tablets have delivered “end user experience” that is problematic, compared to Amazon’s experience with books.

At the same time, from a provider perspective, mobile apps that were expected to recast newspaper and magazine readership and revenue have proven more complicated than offline publishing, have cost more than expected and provide less profit than expected.

Amazon, on the other hand, arguably has focused on selling digital content with characteristics that are more congruent with the offline end user experience, at costs more controllable and predictable.

While one might argue that tablet and smart phone content availability is not an order of magnitude more valuable to end users than offline versions of those products, one might well argue that the digital versions of songs, videos and books that Amazon sells provide more value than the digital subscriptions magazines and newspapers have tried to sell.

Also, in terms of the “native app versus Web” delivery formats, some content products are better suited, or equally well suited, to Web distribution, compared to app distribution.

Some of the same fundamental questions must be asked of other new mobile businesses that take offline processes, such as shopping, paying and banking, and attempt to create new mobile versions of those products.

Mass adoption will hinge on whether end users perceive dramatically-better experiences, whether we can quantify how much better those experiences are. The notion of “dramatically better” is akin to “order of magnitude” change that can induce massive end user behavior change, while the “incrementally better” notion, with incremental new hassle, is not likely to lead to behavior change.

Looking only at magazine and newspaper apps, there are issues that illustrate the hurdles. Apple’s 30-percent slice of gross revenue is a problem for suppliers, since that is higher than the typical profit margin for a newspaper or magazine publisher. Irrespective of end user experience, it arguably is a “profitless” exercise to sell a digital magazine or newspaper subscription when the revenue split gives a distributor 30 percent of gross revenue.

Among other complications, though, were how publishers could comply with their normal auditing standards used for offline publications, Technology Review notes.

Nor, oddly enough, did mobile apps represent a particularly easy publishing format. Tablets, and some smart phones, support both a "portrait" (vertical) and "landscape" (horizontal) view, depending on how the user held the device.

Then, too, the screens of smart phones were much smaller than those of tablets.

So many publishers ended up producing six different versions of their editorial product: a print publication, a conventional digital replica for Web browsers and proprietary software, a digital replica for landscape viewing on tablets, something that was not quite a digital replica for portrait viewing on tablets, a kind of hack for smart phones, and ordinary HTML pages for their websites.

Not surprisingly, app development costs were unexpected.

But the real problem, some might argue, is that end users expect an online “link rich” experience when using an app for content consumption, much as they expect with Web-based content consumption.

That conflicts with the walled garden that a newspaper or magazine represents. In one sense, a magazine or newspaper is like a compact disc, a collection of items, whereas people increasingly expect to consume items one at a time, in random fashion.

Fundamentally, people consuming in an online channel are looking for songs, not albums. They are looking for stories, not collections.

The point is that transitioning from offline products to mobile products sometimes is not just a matter of authoring, design and software development. Sometimes the product has to be different when it is a mobile-consumed product, not an offline product.

There are many analogies. A mobile payment capability, for example, has to offer an experience that is qualitatively and significantly better than paying with cash or a credit card. It can’t be a little better. It has to be a lot better. And that means it cannot be new experience that is just seconds faster.

There has to be something about the experience that is much better. Maybe a user won’t be able to quantify the changes so easily. But they have to sense that the “new thing” is really lots better than the “old thing.” Slight little improvements won’t motivate change.

You might argue that Square, and other merchant point of sale services offered by Intuit and PayPal have gotten such big traction because they were those sorts of “vastly better” experiences, allowing small retailers to take credit card and debit card payments where they never could do so before.

Something like that will happen for every successful mobile app and use case, period. But most apps and experiences do not represent that sort of clear advantage for end users. Tablets and smart phones, on the other hand, clearly have succeeded in offering user experience and value much better than users had before.

Without such value, new revenue models and businesses will not succeed in the mobile realm.