Not Your Imagination: People Do Different Things on Their Mobiles

The way U.S. consumers spend their Internet time on their mobile phones is different from the way they spend their time when interacting with Internet applications and services on their PCs, the Nielsen Company has found.

If total Internet use were one hour, the top PC apps would be social networking and blogs, at 13 minutes, 36 seconds of use. Games would occupy six minutes, six seconds. Email tasks would consume five minutes. Use of portals would come in at two minutes, 35 seconds. Search would occupy two minutes, six seconds.

On a mobile device, applications usage patterns are very different. Email activities account for 25 minutes, while seven minutes are consumed interacting with portals. Social networking and blogs would occupy six miinutes, 18 seconds, while search would occupy four minutes.

The Nielsen survey also found a28 percent rise in the prevalence of social networking behavior on the part of mobile Internet users, but the dominance of email activity on mobile devices also was highly pronounced, with an increase from 37.4 percent to 41.6 percent of U.S. mobile Internet time.

Portals remain as the second heaviest activity on mobile Internet (11.6 percent share of time), despite their double digit decline and social networking’s rise to account for 10.5 percent share means the gap is much smaller than a year ago (14.3 percent vs. 8.3 percent).

Other mobile Internet activities seeing significant growth include music, video and movies, both seeing 20 percent plus increases in share of activity year over year. As these destinations gain share, it’s at the cost of other content consumption. News, current events and sports destinations saw more than a 20 percent drop in share of U.S. mobile Internet time.

There seems to be a clear lesson here. People do not have unlimited money or time to spend with applications. So as applications proliferate, users will have to make choices about how they use their time. A day, after all, is a zero-sum game. People might be able to multitask up to a point, but only up to a point. Even if users had unlimited funds, they would not have unlimited time to spend on mobile applications.

“Despite the almost unlimited nature of what you can do on the web, 40 percent of U.S. online time is spent on just three activities, social networking, playing games and emailing leaving a whole lot of other sectors fighting for a declining share of the online pie,” said Nielsen analyst Dave Martin.

more detail here

Top 10 Mobile Downloads

What are the top 10 downloads to mobiles, across ecosystems?

GetJar conducted a review of more than 70,000 apps within its store in July 2010, and Facebook was number one. But messaging, search and mail were among the top 10 apps.

Other leading categories include lifestyle, entertainment, music, maps, search, financial, sports and productivity downloads, though.

Hits Three Million Downloads Per Day | GetJar:

Teens are Distracted Drivers (As if Anybody Doesn't Know That)

Almost nine in 10 teenage drivers (86 percent) have driven while distracted, even though 84 percent of teen drivers know it’s dangerous, according to the American Automobile Association. A survey conducted in May of nearly 2,000 male and female teen drivers ages 16 to 19 revealed that 73 percent have adjusted their radio/CD/MP3 player, 61 percent have eaten food, and 60 percent have talked on a cell phone while driving.

AAA Newsroom

Firefox Market Share Drops

If you are a user who has come to value Mozilla Firefox, you might not be so happy to learn that Firefox has lost a bit of market share against Chrome for three straight months, according to the latest statistics from NetMarketShare. Chrome now has about seven percent global market share.

Many observers would suggest that Google's Chrome is likely to continue doing so, mostly at Mozilla’s expense. Firefox still has about 23 percent share of the global browser market, while Apple's Safari, for example, has just a bit over five percent.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer saw its usage share rise a slender 0.42 per cent in June 2010, presumably on the strength of Internet Explorer 8, which boasts improved security and apparently is benefiting from a rather extensive marketing campaign. Microsoft has 61 percent share of the global browser market.

Firefox market share drops as IE makes slender gain

Rural Broadband Stimulus "Not Enough"

"Broadband is capital intensive, and the level of available (stimulus or other support) funding in the future will influence the ability to achieve big leaps in the level of broadband availability and the rate of upgrades," said Chris Campbell, director of the Vermont Telecommunications Authority.

He's absolutely right: the "broadband stimulus" always was too small to make much of a direct change in rural broadband adoption.

But that's only acknowledging the disparity between urban, suburban and rural communications infrastructure. The costs of deploying modern, up-to-date terrestrial infrastructure always are quite high in the most-rural areas.

In fact, in the most-rural areas, it is virtually impossible to create a self-funding business case, which is why we have subsidy programs of various types.

Of course the broadband stimulus was not enough. Nothing other than permanent subsidies will ever be enough if you are talking about terrestrial, fixed networks.

Stimulus to increase rural broadband may not be enough | The Burlington Free Press

Martin Geddes on Socio-Economic Impact of Cloud Communications

"Telcos in particular are selling very outdated products, particular with voice, that needs substantial rethinking if it's going to have a viable business model going forwards, consultant Martin Geddes says.

If you want to know what might happen next month, or even next year, or if you want a technology tutorial, Martin Geddes is not necessarily what you will be looking for.

If you want to know the deeper, broader trends that shape communications, and what service providers might have to do to re-architect their business models, you might not be able to do better than to listen to Martin.

Here's an audio and written version of his latest musing on the future service provider business model.

Martin Geddes Interview: Cloud Communications and Future of Telecom

Apple Pulls "Other Phones Suck" Videos

Apple apparently has taken down the videos it has been showing of other smartphones experiencing signal indicator drops when held.

Apple gives up trying to make other phones look bad, pulls testing page