Android People Heavier Web Users than iPhone People?

The Motorola Droid is the latest smartphone to be touted as a poential  “iPhone killer.” I'm not among those doing so, not for any lack of confidence in the Droid so much as a belief that the iPhone is not just a smartphone.

Like other Apple products before it, and like some other popular consumer products, the iPhone already has carved out an "experience" and "emotional bond" that cannot be broken by a substitute product.

Still, the Droid seems to be the sort of product that will advance the use and adoption of Web content to a connected device, especially for users whose Web experiences are heavily Google-mediated.

Significantly, Nielsen data from the third quarter of 2009 already suggests Android users are heavy mobile Web users, maybe even more so than iPhone users, who, up to this point, have been the heaviets mobile Web users.

But there is still plenty of room in the market for devices that are optimized around a lead application. The iPhone might have been the best example to date of a device really optimized around Web access as BlackBerry has been optimized around mobile email and other devices are plumbing the "turn by turn navigation" app, for example.

In the fourth quarter of 2009, perhaps 40 percent of all new devices sold will be smartphones of one sort or another. By 2011, smartphones will represent the majority of phones in use, Nielsen forecasts.

"Projecting Nielsen data out through 2010, we see smartphones crossing 50 percent of the market by the middle of 2011, roughly equal to 150 million users," says Jerry Rocha, Nielsen Online Division senior director.

Sabi the War Hero Dog

Okay, I love labradors....labradors that defy death, get lost for 14 months and then get to go home is even better.

Verizon Grows Annual Revenue 5x More Than Average

Verizon's revenue growth over the last year tops, by a substantial margin, revenue growth for nearly all other service providers among the 30 largest in the world.

Annual revenue growth of about 1.6 percent is the average, says TeleGeography.

Verizon grew revenue by 10 percent. Vodafone, China Mobile and Deutsche Telekom were the other stand-outs.

Despite Shocking Unemployment, Consumer Demand for Communications Holds Up

There's a sobering statistic in the latest research from Centris about consumer spending on communications and video service consumption: 27 percent of households reporting at least one member who lost their job in the last six months.

Most of the other findings seem consistent with other surveys taken over the last two years, though. The issue now is whether recession-induced behaviors will change as we exit the recession.

About eight percent of U.S. households said they were likely to cancel their Pay TV service in the third quarter of 2009, unchanged from the second quarter of 2009. Keep in mind that a typical churn rate for video services is about two percent a month, so those findings are relatively consistent with typical disconnect plans, and most churners simply sign up with alternate providers.

Some 18 percent of households said they were likely to cancel their home phone service and replace it with a currently-used cell phone. That is an underlying trend that might have accelerated during the recession, but was in place already.

Fully 75 percent of respondents said they would not likely downgrade their Internet access service. Virtually all other studies show high resistance to cutting back, or cutting off, Internet access services.

Nearly half of all households have contacted their current TV service providers shopping for discounts and lower-priced packages, though.

If past patterns show themselves, consumers should start spending more on enhanced services of all sorts, including premium video entertainment and mobile services, as the economic recovery takes hold. The wild card are services such as wired voice, which have been under pressure for other reasons unrelated directly to the recession.

Video Now Driving Bigger Access Bandwidth Packages, says Compete.com

How much Internet-delivered video is being consumed by users of sites such as Hulu.com or Netflix.com? According to compete.com data, Hulu.com traffic has grown 210 percent over the last year.

"If Hulu.com continued this growth trajectory for another year, we could see it break into Compete.com’s top 50, surpassing unique visitor traffic to sites like the NYtimes.com and Netflix.com," says Matt McGlinn, Compete.com writer.

From September 2008 to September 2009, Netflix.com’s volume of unique visitors viewing movies and other content online increased 163 percent, says Compete.com.

The good news for Internet service providers is that these trends will keep driving end users to buy access packages featuring higher amounts of bandwidth, says McGlinn.

Will Click-to-Connect applications Replace IVR?

Yes, says Sorell Slaymaker, Unified IT Systems VP. The reason is that most consumers initiate their contact to a business using the web and then switch to some other channel only if the web does not solve whatever need, issue or problem needs to be solved.

Compared to using a phone for initial contact, "web with click to call" can store information, so it does not have to be rekeyed. The equivalent of cookies is not available when initiating a session using phone methods, he argues.

The other advantage is the ability to push content while talking, he says. Visual communication is richer and quicker than audio communication, and putting the two together optimizes the efficiency and effectiveness of communication.

Does "Open Access" Lead to More or Less Consumption of Broadband?

Samuel Clemens famously quipped that there are "dies, damned lies and statistics." Something like that seems to be at the heart of conflicting analyses of the impact of widespread open access requirements on consumer buying of broadband access services.

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society suggests robust open access regulation increases consumer buying of broadband while analysts at the Phoenix Center says the opposite is true.

The interpretation matters. Good public policy requires decisions that are based on facts, as difficult as it may be to determine precisely what the "facts" are. The wrong "fact base" will lead to policies that could harm the intended public policy goal.

http://www.fcc.gov/stage/pdf/Berkman_Center_Broadband_Study_13Oct09.pdf

http://www.phoenix-center.org/perspectives/Perspective09-05Final.pdf