PCs Getting Less Use at Small Businesses

A survey of 2,223 owners and managers at companies with less than 500 employees, most of them with between five and 499 workers, suggests that "PC" use is declining, while other digital devices, including tablets and smartphones are taking up the slack.

Beyond the finding that nine percent of business owners were using iPads (as of November 2010), the study found that 79 percent of small- and midsize-business owners used a desktop computer, down from 83 percent in 2010.

Some 16 percent used a netbook or notebook, down from 21 percent earlier in 2010.  About 60 percent used a laptop, down from 65 percent.

Note the trend: tablets up, desktop PCs, netbooks down, notebooks down.

About 37 percent used a smartphone or other personal digital assistant, up from 27 percent the prior year.

Fully 31 percent were using mobile applications, a category that wasn’t even measured the previous year, on smartphones, cell phones, or tablet computers.

What all of that might mean is that many business and work tasks really do not require much in the way of content creation, beyond replying to emails or social media messages.

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Rabobank’s iPhone App: Take a Picture, Pay a Bill

Rabobank’s iPhone app allows customers to pay bills by taking a picture of the bill.

About 30 percent of Dutch consumers pay their bills by using "acceptgiros," standard yellow payment forms that merchants sent to them together with their bills. These forms are prefilled with all relevant information that is required to make the payment. The customer can pay the bill by simply signing the acceptgiro and dropping it into the letterbox of his bank, or by paying it directly using online banking.

Dutch Rabobank has added a new functionality to its iPhone mobile banking app which it calls "acceptgiroscan." Users of the app can pay bills by simply taking a picture of the acceptgiro with the phone’s built-in camera.

Rabobank’s iPhone App Lets Customers Pay Bills By Simply Taking Pictures Of Them | Forrester Blogs

Fiber to the Home in Shanghai

Summary of the Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS Service Disruption

"The issues affecting EC2 customers last week primarily involved a subset of the Amazon Elastic Block Store (“EBS”) volumes in a single Availability Zone within the US East Region that became unable to service read and write operations," Amazon says.

This caused instances trying to use these affected volumes to also get “stuck” when they attempted to read or write to them. In order to restore these volumes and stabilize the EBS cluster in that Availability Zone, Amazon disabled all control APIs (e.g. Create Volume, Attach Volume, Detach Volume, and Create Snapshot) for EBS in the affected Availability Zone for much of the duration of the event.

For two periods during the first day of the issue, the degraded EBS cluster affected the EBS APIs and caused high error rates and latencies for EBS calls to these APIs across the entire US East Region, Amazon says.

Summary of the Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS Service Disruption

Summary of the Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS Service Disruption

"The issues affecting EC2 customers last week primarily involved a subset of the Amazon Elastic Block Store (“EBS”) volumes in a single Availability Zone within the US East Region that became unable to service read and write operations," Amazon says.

This caused instances trying to use these affected volumes to also get “stuck” when they attempted to read or write to them. In order to restore these volumes and stabilize the EBS cluster in that Availability Zone, Amazon disabled all control APIs (e.g. Create Volume, Attach Volume, Detach Volume, and Create Snapshot) for EBS in the affected Availability Zone for much of the duration of the event.

For two periods during the first day of the issue, the degraded EBS cluster affected the EBS APIs and caused high error rates and latencies for EBS calls to these APIs across the entire US East Region, Amazon says.

Summary of the Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS Service Disruption

Consumers Feel Smart Phone Obsolescence

When asked, 62 percent of respondents to a Retrevo survey said they currently feel their smart phone already is "out of date," or will be before their service contracts expire. That speaks both to the rapid pace of smart device innovation and the upside for providers of the latest smart phone models.

The solution, some would argue, are shorter contracts, or no contracts. One is reminded of the surveys taken to assess consumer receptivity to advertising. Those surveys virtually always find that people don't really like ads. But they like the idea of paying more for their desired content even less.

That's essentially what the Retrevo survey found as well.

When asked if they would be willing to pay extra for a shorter contract, most responded as you would guess, with a "no." But some would pay as much as $100 extra to get a one-year contract rather than a two-year contract.

Those sorts of questions and answers are instructive, but also hinge on consumer desire, at least in the U.S. market, for high subsidies on their devices. Few consumers really want to pay $400 to $500 for their devices, to get a contract-free service plan. Most put up with contracts so they can buy those devices for $200 to $250.

You can argue all you want about the wisdom of those preferences. Most of the money a consumer spends over the length of the relationship is service fees. The device cost is a relatively small matter in comparison. But consumers have voted with their wallets, and service providers, though not enamored of the operating expense the subsidies represent, do not seem likely to abandon the model, simply because it works.

One also might argue that the subsidies, which encourage users to swap out their devices more frequently, are one reason the U.S. market now is the world leader in terms of application innovation. A user that has invested $500 to $600 in a mobile device is likely to feel obligated to use that device as long as possible.

A user that has invested only $200 to $250 is less likely to be wedded to any particular device, and is likely to feel that investing in another, updated device makes sense.

http://www.retrevo.com/content/blog/2011/04/are-you-prisoner-your-phone-carrier

Cloud Incidents Illustrate Trend

The recent Amazon Web Services outage illustrates a broader computing trend you'll all recognize, in your roles as consumers, small business or enterprise users of technology. And that trend is that, across the board, users are required to take a more-active role in managing their technology. Most people discover they are required to learn more about their computing devices and applications than they actually would prefer, just to use the tools.

Many would note that the lesson from the AWS outage is that the normal advice to build in redundancy and resiliency into an applications or hardware infrastructure applies equally when buying cloud computing services.

"While it is important to maintain pressure on service providers to improve their reliability footprint, the onus of developing or contracting reliable system stays with their clients, and there won’t be any miraculous cloud that provides 100 percent uptime or that does not risk to fail meeting its own SLAs," says Andrea Di Maio, Gartner VP.

Cloud Incidents Are a Welcome Wake Up Call for the IT Industry: