Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Salesforce.com and Google?
Google, enterprise. Salesforce.com, advertising. Does this start to make sense to you? Salesforce customers can already manage their AdWords campaigns from within Salesforce.com and Google wants to sell its apps to enterprise customers. And Salesforce.com with an integrated desktop productivity suite?
Keep in mind the uber trends: consumer technologies blending with enteprise; advertising blending with "shrink wrap" software models; Web services replacing client-server or local computing.
Monday, April 7, 2008
Go wireless to get a job; CompTIA
Among specific industries, IT managers in healthcare (63 percent) and education (63 percent) were more likely to identify wireless technology as the skill that will be most important five years from now. IT managers in the auto/manufacturing sector (48 percent) were less likely to consider wireless important.
400 Percent Mobile Penetration
Hulu Scores, YouTube Could
When NBC and News Corp announced two years ago that they were creating a new online destination to compete with YouTube, the idea was met with at least some derision, especially from the digirati. As is generally the case, proponents of new media and new "everything" tend to disparage the legacy players opportunties to do anything right in the new way.
But Hulu has done a lot of things right. For starters, it comes me access to short snippets of branded content I actually want to watch, and sometimes have missed. In Hulu's case, it is mostly 30 Rock and Saturday Night Live.
The user interface is really clean, of course, and it is easy to navigate. YouTube dominates user-generated videos of course, so if that is what you are looking for, go there.
At some point, full-length episodes of major TV shows also will be made available, and that's the point. Quality content is very hard to create. So most of what appears on YouTube either isn't very good, or simply isn't of interest.
Hulu doesn't compete with YouTube, in my case or probably in just about any other case. Hulu, even with limited content, is more of a "destination" site, where YouTube isn't. YouTube could change that, in at least one important dimension, though. YouTube would seem a much better destination for business-oriented video, such as a keynote at a conference I didn't attend.
If YouTube or any other provider can put together enough of that sort of content, I will use it.
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Mobile Calls: 40% Are Churn Inducing
The reason is that subjective call quality below a MOS score of 2.5 is considered "unacceptable" by users and the ITU. When so many mobile calls are right at the threshold, they are, by definition, not "quality" calls.
You might wonder how it is that so many calls, and so many carriers, in so many countries, can have that many calls of questionable quality, when network engineers will tell you the networks are performing quite well.
The problem is that both the survey results and the network engineers are generally right: the "network" is working as it should. The problem is that problems outside the network (ambient environment around the user handset, for example) are disrupting performance. If you test the "network" in the old way, the ambient disruptors cannot be detected.
In mature markets such as the
There are three primary issues, says Ken Croley, Ditech Networks director. Ambient noise, or noise that originates in the caller’s environment and enters the device’s microphone, was rated “objectionable” on up to 50 percent of all calls in some regions.
Acoustic echo, which is often caused by mobile handsets and headsets, was rated “objectionable” on up to 11 percent of all calls in some regions. That includes distortion-inducing elements such as Bluetooth ear pieces, for example.
Voice level mismatch, which makes it sound like a caller is speaking either too loudly or too softly, was rated “objectionable” on up to 28 percent of all calls in some regions, and is generally seen as a byproduct of codec mismatches.
The finds came as "a shock to carriers," says Croley. The distortions are "external to the network and missed by the network tests precisely because external to the network." Audio can bounce off a car windshield and back into a microphone, for example.
Ambient noise levels are an issue as well: think of the trade show floor at CTIA or a crowded bar on Friday night.
The audits were conducted using Experience Intelligence (EXi), a technology developed by Ditech that quantifies the impact of voice quality impairments caused by the places where people make calls, codec impairments, and mobile devices like phones and headsets.
EXi is based on the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) G.107 E-Model, a widely used industry standard, and the technology has been utilized in the communications industry as a complement to existing voice quality test and measurement solutions.
Ditech believes the problems can be fixed by using EXi. Of course, there is the other solution: ban Bluetooth, prohibit talking in noisy places and outlaw talking while driving. Right.
Friday, April 4, 2008
Unlimited Plan Impact
What does seem likely is that more users will be exposed to what they can do when they have data services beyond texting. To the extent there is an ultimate change in revenue, it will be found in increased sales of data products of various types.
Verizon earlier had noted that just 305,000 of its subscribers--0.5% of its sub base--had wireless calling plans priced at more than $99.99 per month, at the time it launched its unlimited calling plan.
Those customers spent an average of $125 to $135 per month on phone calls. So even if every one of those customers dropped down to $99 a month plans, Verizon would be looking at just $7.6 million to $10.7 million in lost revenue per month.
And that would be balanced by increased revenue from customers upgrading to the new plan.
2010 for Verizon, at&t 4G Nets
And they might just watch Xohm and Clearwire for clues about demand. If growth is sluggish, there will be incentive to delay. If growth is robust, they'll stay on schedule. There's still lots of work to do creating new revenue-generating applications on the 3G network.
And watching what users do on 3G networks is key. Just recently, Apple's iPhone has shown that the right device and plan can cause new behaviors to explode. And that's just on the slower Edge network. Once we start to get data on 3G use, we'll get some additional glimmers of what might be feasible for 4G.
One trend already seems clear. If carriers can get smart phones into the hands of users--by selling them at lower prices--then data plan usage goes way up. And having lots of people using data plans is about the only way we're going to figure out what things people want to do.
And since the 3G network will remain in operation, there will be a huge need to create new "data" applications that require 4G capabilities without simply cannibalizing 3G alternatives. It's sort of odd to think of 3G as a "legacy" network, but that's what it is becoming. It remains a strategic legacy network to be sure. The point is simply that 4G makes no sense unless it expands the range of new services people can use. Nobody needs another "voice and text" or "moderate speed broadband" network.
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