Mobile Apps Represent 75% of All Mobile Minutes of Usage

source: comScore data, Business Insider graphic

Over the past three years, total digital media time spent by U.S. mobile users has grown 53 percent, driven mostly by mobile apps and, to a lesser extent, mobile web. Interaction with mobile apps now represents nearly 60 percent of total time spent with media content.

Desktop usage has actually declined by 11 percent, according to ComScore.

Smartphone apps alone now account for nearly half of all digital media time and 75 percent of minutes of mobile usage in total.

source: ComScore

Universal Internet Access in 6 Countries Would Eliminate 55% of Global Digital Divide

source: ITU

Providing universal Internet access to just three countries (India, China and Indonesia) would eliminate 45 percent of the “unconnected to Internet” population of the globe.

Doing so in just six countries (adding in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria) would solve the digital divide problem for 55 percent of the world’s people, according to the International Telecommunications Union.

About 20 countries account for 75 percent of those not using the Internet, according to McKinsey researchers.

The World Bank points out that many of these offline populations share common characteristics. They are predominantly rural, low-educated, with lower incomes, and a large number are women and girls, according to the World Bank.

Affordability is an issue. According to ITU’s latest price research, a monthly fixed broadband package cost 1.7percent  of average income in developed countries, compared with 31 percent  of average income in developing countries, and 64 percent of average income in Africa.

Mobile broadband costs one to two percent of monthly income in developed countries, compared with 11 percent to 25 percent  of monthly average income in developing countries.

Lack of networks also is a big issue. Of the nearly four billion people not connected to the Internet, some 1.6 billion live in remote locations where networks do not exist. That is why Facebook and Google are developing unmanned aerial vehicle systems, Google is developing Project Loon and both are working on fixed access networks.

Among the 3.9 billion people who are not online, many people may be unaware of the Internet’s potential, or cannot use it because they lack the necessary skills or because there is little or no useful content in their native language, on top of facing other barriers to Internet access, including unreliable power supplies and/or sparse network coverage.

with just 137 million customers and a broadband penetration rate of just 13 percent, compared with a mobile penetration rate of 80 percent , India’s digital leap is just starting.

source: ITU

Why is Verizon Getting Fewer iPhone 7 Orders?

Why is Verizon apparently having a harder time getting iPhone accounts, as exemplified by Verizon customer demand for the Apple iPhone? Promotional pricing by competitors, one might argue.

Pre-orders of iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus at Sprint (NYSE: S) are up more than 375 percent in the first three days over last year.

Since Sprint  began accepting pre-orders for the new iPhone 7, new and existing customers have been placing orders for the devices at a rate nearly four times greater than this time last year.

T-Mobile US says it is seeing iPhone 7 orders four times higher than comparable rates for the iPhone 6.

AT&T has reported “higher than expected” orders for the new iPhones.

Verizon says demand for the new iPhone was about what it expected.

Perhaps it is promotional pricing by Sprint and T-Mobile US that explains the difference. Prior to the iPhone 7 launch, Sprint and T-Mobile US, plus AT&T to an arguably lesser extent, had launched new “unlimited usage” plans.

Verizon, AT&T Make IoT Moves

Verizon and AT&T have taken other moves to support their moves into the broader Internet of Things business, on both the “use my network for connectivity” and “use my platform to build your apps” dimensions.

Historically, the cost to connect remote sensors (now considered part of the Internet of Things) to a 4G mobile network has been higher than linking using Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zwave or ZigBee.

Verizon believes it can close much of that gap by directly embedding Qualcomm Technologies by embedding the ThingSpace  IoT functions directly on Qualcomm chips used for communications.

ThingSpace is Verizon’s global IoT app development platform.

ThingSpace will embedded on the Qualcomm Technologies’ MDM9206 Category M (Cat M1) LTE modems.

The embedded ThingSpace IoT platform will be available for OEM integration in early 2017, Qualcomm says.

Verizon also acquired a “smart cities” systems supplier--Sensity Systems--intended to add a comprehensive suite of smart city solutions to its ThingSpace platform.

Verizon also has acquired Fleetmatics, a vehicle telematics and fleet management supplier, as well as Telogis, a provider of connected vehicle solutions.

Mobile Webpages Load Slow, But Ads are a Big Part of the Problem

After an analysis of 10,000 mobile web domains, DoubleClick found that most mobile sites have an average load time of 19 seconds over 3G connections.

You might assume that 4G Long Term Evolution networks would perform much better. They are better, but not that much better. “On a 4G network the average time isn’t much better: 14 seconds,” DoubleClick says.

That is important since other studies suggest that 53 percent of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than three seconds to load.

Conversely, sites that load in five seconds get 25 percent  higher ad viewability, experience

70 percent longer average sessions and have 35 percent lower bounce rates

Some 46 percent of consumers say that waiting for pages to load is what they dislike the most when browsing the mobile web, DoubleClick says.

Oddly enough, ads arguably are the main reason mobile webpage load times are a problem.

On average, mobile ads take five seconds to load, or roughly twice as long as ads on desktop.

That’s because, while a mobile webpage size is 1.49 Mbps, on average, mobile ads are 816 KB, more than half of the mobile page download size, according to Business Intelligence.

How Artificial Intelligence is Directly Related to Core Telecom Service Revenues

It is not always completely obvious how various technologies are related to the core of the telecom industry. Consider artificial intelligence, which might be considered an esoteric matter of little direct relevance for core telecom service revenues.

So here's an argument about why artificial intelligence (or machine learning or cognitive technologies in general are of direct relevance for tier-one telecom service providers.

After the mobile data market has reached saturation, and amidst declines in all other legacy service revenues, how will tier-one service providers replace at least half of all current revenues within a decade? 

Some of us argue that, at the moment, the conceivable big new revenues come from the broad Internet of Things and machine-to-machine communications areas, simply because all those sensors and servers will require communications, often mobile communications.

So core telecom revenues might substantially hinge on IoT and M2M. But making sense of all that data necessarily requires a number of other developments, including artificial intelligence (or machine learning or cognitive technologies). 

In that sense, artificial intelligence (the ability to make sense of mountains of possibly unstructured data) is directly related to the future of core telecom service revenues. 

That might be why IBM’s Watson will be embedded into Cisco routers and services.

So IoT essentially requires artificial intelligence, and mobile operators require the big revenues IoT will drive.

Shipping Cost Drives 42% of Shopping Cart Abandonments

source: Royal Mail

Free shipping--at least in the United Kingdom--really matters, a study of e-commerce behavior has found.

Cart abandonment rates in 2016 are the same as 2015: 91 percent of online shoppers claim to have abandoned a cart over the last twelve months.

However the frequency of shoppers abandoning orders has decreased by 10 percent since 2015.

Website and technical problems showed the biggest improvements, with consumers reporting they less frequently abandoned a possible purchase for those reasons.

There was also a decline in those saying “I wasn’t happy with the delivery charge”, which fell from 44 percent to 42 percent.

Still, delivery costs cause 42 percent of cart abandonments. About 66 percent of online shoppers say they are unlikely to place an order if they feel the cost of delivery is too high.

About half of online shoppers expect no minimum spend to receive free delivery. About 29 percent of respondents said they would shop elsewhere if a retailer had a minimum spend policy.

Younger shoppers are significantly more likely to spend the required amount to qualify for free delivery, while older shoppers will simply switch to another retailer who doesn’t charge for delivery.