Facebook "Mobile Only" Activity Grows 23% in One Quarter

In Facebook's first filing of a "10 Q" report with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Facebook reported that 102 million people accessed Facebook solely from mobile in June 2012, a  23 percent increase over the 83 million "mobile-only" users in March, 2012, Facebook's first 10 Q report indicates.


That shows the urgency Facebook needs to apply in the effort to go "mobile first," as Apple and Google already have done with arguably more revenue success. 


The 10 Q report notes that 18.7 percent of Facebook's 543 million monthly mobile users don’t even visit Facebook's "desktop or PC" formatted site.


That means huge exposure for Facebook in the advertising revenues area, and might account for the steady decline of Facebook's stock price since the initial public offering. 


So far, Facebook's approach is the "sponsored story," which first was available to advertisers in February 2012.


But you might argue mobile versions of sponsored stories are quite a bit more effective than sponsored stories viewed on a PC screen. Those mobile "ads" may receive as high as 13 times the click through rate of sponsored stories delivered to PC screens, the filing suggests. 

In U.S. Market, Cable Broadband Increasingly is Preferred to Telco Broadbvand

In 2006, U.S. telcos as a whole were adding more high-speed access customers than U.S. cable companies. Since 2008, cable companies have been adding more high-speed access customers than telcos, with the gap really opening by 2010.


During the second quarter of 2012, cable companies took a 140 percent share of broadband flow during the quarter, according to UBS Research telecom analyst John Hodulik notes.


Given the commanding telco ownership of the strategic wireless business, the continued slow decline of the telco consumer voice business, again largely to the benefit of cable operators, plus the heightened importance of the business customer segment, all might suggest that the tier-one U.S. telcos quietly have decided to focus their efforts on wireless services, with fixed network attention increasingly focused on business customer accounts. 


Some of us would say, in fact, that the U.S. leaders in consumer local access, in the future, might be the cable providers, while the telcos remain dominant in wireless and business services. 


That isn't to say that telcos can afford to give up on fixed network consumer accounts; simply that the approach has to be "mobile first," "business second." In the consumer segment, telcos will basically try to stay "close enough," without real expectations of sustaining market leadership in consumer services. 


That will be a huge change in U.S. communications industry dynamics, but it is hard to predict any other outcome, extrapolating from current trends. 

M-Commerce Growing to 24% of Total E-Commerce by 2017

The mobile commerce market is expected to account for 24.4 percent of overall e-commerce revenues by the end of 2017, according to ABI Research.

In 2011, the mobile online commerce market doubled in size to $65.6 billion in transaction volume.
Still, mobile commerce is a relatively small percentage of the overall e-commerce market, though growing at a much faster rate.

Tablet Ownership Now at 34%

Some 58 percent of American consumers now use smart phones (76 percent among those under age 44), while tablet usage has grown from 0 to 34 percent in two years, according to Frank N. Magid Associates.


By mid 2013, the smart phone audience will increase 53 percent from 99 million to 151 million users, and the tablet audiences will more than double, from 51 million to 106 million users, Frank N. Magid Associates predicts. 


Among consumers planning to purchase mobile devices in the next 12 months, 51 percent already own a tablet, while 75 percent already own a smart phone.

BT Sees 13 Percent Olympics Traffic Spike

BT has reported a 13 percent increase in traffic on its national infrastructure over the last seven days, as the Olympic Games traffic has surged. Average peak traffic on the BT London 2012 network was estimated to be over 6 Gbps, BT says.

So far, at least, fears of bandwidth bottlenecks have not really emerged, with the exception of O2 having trouble sending Olympic cycling results.

FreedomPop Free Wireless Internet Now for iPod Touch

FreedomPop, which offers a freemium model mobile broadband service, now is supporting Apple iPod Touch devices.

FreedomPop buys capacity from Clearwire, and offers a free 500 Mbyte access, with pricing of additional gigabytes at $10 per gigabyte. Apparently the notion is that many users, especially pre-teens and teenagers, will want to use their iPod Touch devices on the network.

6 Mobile Payment Myths, According to Intuit