Tablet Adoption Reaches 50% of Broadband Homes

It makes sense that personal devices used by people will outnumber shared devices used by households (TVs, refrigerators). 

At the moment, smart phones have become the consumer electronics product with the highest penetration, among smart phones, tablets, smart TVs, game consoles or digital media devices, according to Parks Associates.

Parks Associates predicts the number of U.S. tablet users will increase by 61 percent from 2013 to 2014.

Tablet adoption already is close to 50 percent of all U.S. broadband households, said Heather Way, Parks Associates senior research analyst.

Separately, researchers at the Pew Internet and American Life Project now estimate that about 34 percent of U.S. adults ages 18 and older own a tablet computer like an iPad, Samsung Galaxy Tab, Google Nexus, or Kindle Fire, up nearly 100 percent, year over year.

In 2012, about 18 percent of surveyed respondents owned a tablet.

As you might guess, there are differences in rates of adoption, as there were with smart phones.

As was true for Apple iPhone owners, households with higher incomes are more likely to be tablet owners. About 56 percent of households earning at least $75,000 per year own tablets, compared to 38 percent of people in households earning between $50,000 and $74,999.

About 28 percent of respondents in households with $30,000 to $49,999 in income own tablets, compared to 20 percent of respondents in households below $30,000 annual household income.

Unlike smart phones, which are most popular with younger adults ages 18 to 34, the highest rates of tablet ownership occur among adults 35 to 44. In that age bracket, 49 percent of respondents report owning a tablet.

In the 25 to 34 age bracket, 37 percent of respondents own a tablet. About 18 percent of adults ages 65 and older are less likely to own a tablet.

Tablet adoption, as did iPhone adoption, also is directly related to education. About 49 percent of adults with at least a college degree own a tablet. Only 17 percent of those who did not graduate high school own a tablet.

The findings might suggest that smart phones are “mission critical” devices, while tablets are more discretionary.

Intel Might Have to Pay 75% More for Content Than Other Video Service Providers

The problem attackers will have, when trying to disrupt the traditional TV business, is that if the content owners control the value proposition, disruption is not possible unless those content owners agree to be disrupted.

In other words, it is the content, or programming, that provides the value, not so much the delivery network. To disintermediate the distributors, the content owners will have to conclude that they can make as much, if not more money, by supporting Internet-direct suppliers such as Intel. 

For consumers, there are direct implications as well. Most people probably assume that one advantage of Internet delivery is the ability to watch content on any device, nearly anywhere, for less money.

To be sure, those value dimensions are not necessarily linked. Value could be "watch on any device," or "watch anywhere" or "watch for less money" or any combination.

But the "watch for less money" remains one of the assumptions nobody can be too sure about.  Intel, for example, is offering to pay as much as 75 percent more than cable operators do, to get the content Intel needs to provide a viable competitor to cable, satellite or telco TV offers. 

There are other elements of its business plan, of course, but it is hard to sell at a discount to the market leaders when the cost of goods might be that much higher. 

Deride it If You Must, But Capitalism Has Lifted 1 Billion Out of Extreme Poverty in 20 Years

Between 1990 and 2010, the number of people living in “extreme poverty” declined by 50 percent in developing countries, from 43 percent to 21 percent, lifting about a billion people out of extreme poverty.

And though the implications will be discomforting for some, free market capitalism is the reason for the progress.

Poverty rates started to collapse towards the end of the 20th century largely because developing-country growth accelerated, from an average annual rate of 4.3 percent in 1960-2000 to six percent in 2000-10.

That is important since 66 percent of poverty reduction within any country comes from growth.

To be sure, greater income equality can contribute about 33 percent. A one percent increase in incomes in the most unequal countries produces a mere 0.6 percent reduction in poverty; in the most equal countries, it yields a 4.3 percent cut in poverty.

Still, since so much of the recent rise has occurred in China, lifting the next billion out of extreme poverty likely will be tougher.

It is easy to attribute most ills of modern life to capitalism. But those attributions are wrong, on one important dimension. If you want to eliminate poverty, free markets work better than anything else we have been able to devise. It rarely works without externalities.

But trying to cure all the externalities will fail if the growth engine itself is constrained. Without growth, we cannot solve any of our key problems. That isn’t to say growth does not create some problems: it does.

Still, without growth, almost nothing else is possible.

Will "Homezones" Compete with or Complement Other ISP Services?

Cable companies are some of the ISPs that might in the future extend Internet access using “homespots” in addition to “hotspots.” The distinction is that ISPs might require, as one of the terms of service, that some portion of at-home bandwidth be reserved for “public” access by other users.

As Fon and Devicescape have done, this would potentially create a “new” network stitched together by amalgamating formerly-private at-home ISP connections.

Homespot Connect, for example, is an Android app that allows smart phone users to connect to Telenet Telenet (Belgium) “homespots.”

Google has for some time been collecting information about U.S. Wi-Fi locations, as part of its Google Maps app. In principle, that could help Google (or users) later if mechanisms to create homespots become more common.

It remains difficult to say with precision whether such “homespot” efforts represent “competition” to mobile or fixed ISP offers.

For some users, who use public Wi-Fi instead of at-home ISP service, there is some amount of competition. But most users tend to use Wi-Fi as a complement to their paid-for ISP services.

In that sense, homespots or public Wi-Fi hotspots offer more coverage, or the ability to offload traffic, and hence mostly are complementary to fixed or mobile ISP service. In principle, that is little different than a mobile operator deploying small cells to provide more capacity in dense urban areas.

But it would be fair to say that in the future, when many subscribers have connections operating at hundreds of megabits per second to a gigabit per second, there should be plenty of bandwidth to enable those at-home connections in “homezone” fashion as well, without affecting the subscriber’s experience.

Still, it will be a matter of business logic, more than anything else, that determines whether a specific homezone network is complementary or competitive to any other ISP operations.

Will Intelligence Gathering Will Slow Cloud Computing?

It sometimes takes an outsider to tell what is happening "inside" a firm or nation. And one Canadian points out one information technology downside to what users reasonably might conclude are threats to information privacy: namely the threat to U.S.-based cloud computing services, compared to services based elsewhere.

In other words, a resident of Canada, needed to source cloud services there, might now conclude that it cannot buy from Amazon or Google or Verizon or other cloud suppliers because of the increased risk of government data acquisition or even transparency about the level of risk. 

Separately, there also are indications the European Union might now be rethinking what U.S. cloud computing risk might mean elsewhere. 

So some would-be customers will have to add intelligence risk to their decisions about sourcing cloud services. Some might conclude that they simply cannot source cloud computing from U.S. suppliers.

And though some blame Verizon or Google for cooperating with U.S. intelligence probes, some might say the bigger culprits are laws that allow overly-broad data gathering, or government agencies that either overreach, illegally use information to punish political opponents. 

After all, a single citizen or business cannot easily refuse to comply with a "lawful" request for records. Nor can citizens prevent people inside agencies from misusing data for other purposes. 

Beyond that, the issue is whether agencies now have become in some way institutionally corrupted, and whether U.S. citizens have allowed that corruption to happen, directly or indirectly.

The issue of "liberty" and other countervailing trends (legitimate needs to provide protection from terrorism) now pose issues the nation has not resolved. And some would say another complicating factor is the growth of the administrative state. That makes effective citizen control much more difficult.

For perhaps the first time, the next generation of computing architecture (cloud and mobile) now is significantly affected by political concerns. And that potentially is going to slow the growth of cloud computing, unless the political problems are addressed. 

More Impoper "Leaking" of Personal Data

A bipartisan group of 24 senators want to know why the Environmental Protection Agency leaked the personal data of more than 80,000 farms and livestock facilities to environmental groups. 

But some might argue there is a partisan angle to at least some of the "leaks." When the government intentionally leaks something that helps its perceived agenda, that's okay. 

When the leaks are not seen as helping, then leaking is a crime. 

Poll Shows Apple Losing "Cool"

A new poll suggests there is some truth to the notion that Apple has lost some of its "cool" lately. Last year, 81 percent of those under 30 years old said they viewed Apple favorably.

This year, that number was down to 71 percent. 

According to a poll, 83 percent of adult respondents have a favorable view of Google. Some 72 percent have a favorable view of Apple and 60 percent have such a view of Facebook. 

The poll results are said to be similar to last year's results, with one possible exception.