Tablet Market Share: iPad Dominates

Apple's iPad has jumpstarted the market and rapidly captured 95 percent global share during the third quarter of 2010.

However, Apple's huge lead will be shortlived, as a wave of Android models is set to flood the market in the fourth quarter, says Strategy Analytics analyst Neil Mawston.

There might once have been some doubt about whether tablet devices would succeed as a distinct product category, or as a segment of the notebook PC market, or something else. Perhaps the most important conclusion so far is that consumers like the devices, and that there does seem to be demand, whether as a substitute for existing products or as a brand new product category.

If that is the case, rival suppliers are not going to sit around and watch Apple grab 90 percent global share, as it has done in the MP3 player market, or significant share, as it has done in the smartphone market.

Global Tablet Vendor Market Share

Enterprises Dominate Mobile Ad Spending

More than a third of interactive marketers have implemented or plan to pilot mobile search and display advertising in the next year, according to Forrester Research analyst Melissa Parrish. And just about everyone believes such spending will grow.

For that reason, Forrester Research expects that interactive marketer spending on mobile search and display will grow at a 28 percent compound annual growth rate over the next five years.

Forrester expects that mobile Internet usage will increase at a compound annual rate of 12.7 percent, with 117 million people — 36 percent of the US population — searching and browsing while using their mobile devices by 2015, Parrish says.

Mobile marketing opportunities will grow as more people use the mobile Internet, of course. At the end of 2007, only 10 percent of U.S. adult subscribers used the mobile Internet. In 2010, mobile Internet usage is up to 27 percent of mobile subscribers, representing 64 million consumers in the
United States market.

Mobile Internet users also are learning to use their mobiles to make purchases. And they aren’t just looking for the nearest coffee house; they’re buying airline tickets, researching cars, and receiving coupons for products like coffee or detergent.

Forrester forecasts that mobile search and display dollars will grow to $2.8 billion by 2015, at a
28 percent CAGR.

But critical mass still is lacking. Though mobile Internet usage is increasing rapidly, marketers still can’t get enough eyeballs on content to justify spending big bucks in the space, says Parrish.

Currently, 78 percent of the US population access the Internet at least monthly while only 21 percent access the mobile Internet. By 2015, mobile Internet usage is expected to reach 43 percent of total desktop Internet usage, making the mobile medium a much more viable channel.

Inability to track performance against spend. More than half of interactive marketers feel they have no capability to measure the ROI or brand impact of their mobile marketing campaigns.

Interactive marketers prefer performance-based campaigns and are willing to pay more for these metrics. Vendors like Google and Bing offer cost-per-click pricing for click-to-call and click-to-get-directions type activities, but mobile display is still largely based on potential impressions, an unsatisfactory metric to most marketers.

Additionally, the holy grail of mobile is location-based marketing, but it’s still unclear how the connection between location-marketing efforts and in-store purchases will occur. Vendors must develop the tools for marketers to track performance and then help marketers understand the value and how to use these new tools.

·Spending by small and mid-sized business is not having too much impact, says Parrish. Forrester’s data suggests that fully 95 percent of mobile advertising dollars currently come from companies with more than $100 million in revenue.

Though the value of mobile advertising is highly relevant to small and mid-sized businesses, which benefit greatly from local and location-specific advertising, smaller budgets and less marketing
expertise will make the percentage of overall spend from SMBs consistently less than eight percent of total mobile spend.

Concerns over privacy, specifically location and carrier information, could provoke a backlash among consumers, leading to some caution as well. Consumers consider mobile phones personal devices to a greater extent than PCs and, for that reason, might continue to expect greater privacy in a mobile context, Parrish suggests.

Faster Upstream Cable Speeds Arriving In 2011

The first incarnation of the cable broadband DOCSIS 3.0 standard is theoretically capable of 160 Mbps downstream, and 100 Mbps upstream, on a shared basis. But upstream channel bonding has been hard to perfect, some would note.

For that reason, cable broadband tiers like 50 Mbps down and 5 Mbps upstream, or even in some cases 100 Mbps downstream and just 2 Mbps upstream. Such problems tend to get resolved over time, and new gear might be part of the solution.

Faster Upstream Cable Speeds Arriving In 2011

Will Streaming Displace More Radio Listening?

A new study of 12 to 24 year-old Americans reports Internet usage of two hours and fifty-two minutes per day, roughly triple this age group's reported usage from 2000 (59 minutes).

Radio continues to be the medium most often used for music discovery, with 51 percent of those 12 to 24 reporting that they frequently find out about new music by listening to the radio. 

Other significant sources include friends (46 percent), YouTube (31 percent) and social networking sites (16 percent). Some 20 percent of users 12 to 24 have listened to streaming radio provider Pandora in the last month, with 13 percent indicating usage in the past week. 

By comparison, six percent of those 12 to 24  indicate they have listened to online streams from terrestrial AM or FM stations in the past week.

It is difficult to predict how overall radio listening might change as these users grow older, since much U.S. radio consumption occurs while people are in their cars commuting to and from work. 

The American Youth Study 2010 - Radio's Future

Apple Looking at Mobile Payments?

Apple is among companies just about anybody might argue is in position to make mobile payments more mainstream. Apple already handles payments through iTunes, which boasts 160 million active credit card accounts. PayPal only has 90 million, by way of example.

Of course, such micropayments for online goods are not the same thing as use of a mobile for retail transactions in place of a credit or debit card. But online micropayments could create an important habit that prepares the way for use of an Apple mobile device for other types of transactions.

Apple’s Next Big Strategic Opportunity Could Be Mobile Payments

IBM Looks at The Social Workplace

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As you would expect, younger workers have different expectations about social networking in the workplace.

What Cable Will Do if Online Video Takes Off

Consumers should have the freedom to buy over-the-top video if content owners want to sell it. But one should not expect distributors to stand by and watch their current businesses be damaged as that happens. Neil Smit, president of Comcast's cable division, says that if over-the-top video starts to displace some amount of traditional cable TV viewing, Comcast is more than happy to change its product offerings to accommodate those demands.

"We feel very good about our capacity," says Smit.

Obviously, if a significant percentage of today's subscribers to multichannel video entertainment start to drop those services in favor of online offerings, providers are going to change. But some already are taking steps to protect their legacy businesses while adapting to online video.

To encourage consumers not to abandon cable TV, for example, Comcast has introduced Xfinity, which allows Comcast video subscribers to watch some of that content online. Should that effort succeed, there could be a more gradual shift of viewing and content packaging, as end user value simply is enhanced by the addition of new capabilities that encourage consumers to keep their subscriptions.

If the initiatives don't work, and customers start to abandon even the Xfinity style offers, though, cable and other distributors will confront declining revenues for the base business, which might cause distributors to weigh retail price increases, a shift of programming to emphasize networks that still offer a robust revenue model, price increases for the remaining customers, or renegotiated contracts with programming suppliers to account for the new economic realities.

Of course, the increased over-the-top consumption will drive higher usage of broadband access connections. Under those conditions, it is reasonable to expect that access providers will move towards more reliance on usage-based charging for use of broadband access services.

"People should not think of cable companies as media companies," said Craig Moffett, a senior analyst at Wall Street equities research firm Sanford C. Bernstein. "They are infrastructure companies."

Rather than raising prices on cable broadband across the board, it is logical to expect tiered pricing that reflects usage. That actually makes sense, if one assumes broadband access increasingly might be a differentiated product, offering different buckets of "best effort" usage, as well as services that might be optimized for real-time services. Beyond that, cable operators and telcos have other ways to repackage triple-play or quadruple-play services in ways that optimize value and pricing for multiple products.

Broadly stated, distributors can tweak traditional video subscription prices, terms and conditions in ways that compensate for higher broadband access consumption, and perhaps equally importantly, reward customers for using bandwidth "efficiently."

With Internet TV, cable wins even if it loses