Don’t you dare call us
Remember how we all did the happy dance when the U.S. government created the Do Not Call Registry back in 2003? How we popped the champagne corks because hefty civil penalties could be given to a telemarketer if they called your landline after you had opted-in on the registry? Sure, there are loopholes and enforcement problems but essentially the registry works, and it restored the natural order of things by liberating us from having to drop everything because some faceless, money-grubbing salesperson rang in our living rooms.
A mere eight years later landlines are a dying technology. Cool kids, lower-income people, and savvy middle-agers know there’s really no need for a “home phone.” We’ve never had to worry about mobile phone spam because there is a FCC rule against it. This restriction was premised largely on the fact that, unlike on a landline, receiving a wireless call can cost something to the recipient. Same is true for faxes, for the same reason: unsolicited faxes — i.e., spam — is a civil violation.
But, aside from the practical rationale, this dynamic reflects the fundamental truth that I have a phone to make calls and receive them from whom I choose. I’m not paying all this money to establish a marketing beachhead in my pocket.
Well, hang on to your smartphones: Telemarketers are trying to recreate in mobile what the DNC Registry and the demise of landlines rendered moot. If we don’t make a huge stink about this right now there is a chance, however slight, that robo telemarketing calls will make a come back, on steroids.
This abomination is being teed up as HR 3035, aka the “Mobile Informational Call Act of 2011.” It would amend the Communications Act of 1934 and give legal cover to the cretins of commerce who think they have the right to get your attention, anywhere you happen to be, by leveraging the reality that mobile phones are everywhere and the primary means of communication for hundreds of millions of people.
The proposed bill is very short, and blessedly easy to understand. But it would “permit informational calls to mobile telephone numbers, and for other purposes” (my emphasis added) by the use of an “automatic telephone dialing system.”
Microsoft: mobile getting better, no numbers yet
Microsoft made a big deal of the launch of three U.S. phones running its Windows Phone 7.5 software, the latest upgrade to Windows Phone 7, which represents a complete overhaul of the Microsoft mobile phone software. They built a giant model of a phone in Herald Square, New York City and had rappers and dancers performing around it on Monday, while pizza was handed out to bemused onlookers.
Andy Lees, who leads Microsoft’s phone business, was on hand to talk up the software, which he said has been very well received by consumers.
“When people use it they love it,” he told reporters. “We’re definitely on to something.”
But he was very cagey about how many phone sales exactly this translates to, in the first year of the revamped Windows Phone offerings.
“We sold more than Android in its first year,” Lees said, referring to Google’s Android launch in the fall of 2008. Research firm IDC estimated that about 3.6 million Android phones were sold in its first 12 months, starting in the fourth quarter of 2008. It did not give an estimate for Microsoft’s market share in the third quarter of 2011.
Comscore says Microsoft’s share of the U.S. market actually fell by 0.2 percentage points from the second quarter of 2011 to a 5.6 percent share in the third quarter this year, while Google’s share rose by 4.6 percentage points to 44.8 percent. So Microsoft has a long way to go to establish itself as a major player alongside Android and Apple’s iPhone.
You know what they say about manufacturers who show off their big phones…
teeny, itty-bitty subscriber numbers.
Sprint: When all else fails, call a magician
After bigger rivals Verizon Wireless and AT&T stole the limelight at the Consumer Electronics Show with promises of multiple advanced phones for this year, now Sprint Nextel is trying to grab some attention with a stunt of its own.
In an intentionally mysterious invitation, the No. 3 U.S. mobile provider says it has enlisted the help of illusionist David Blaine to show the world how “Sprint’s making the Impossible Possible” at a New York Event scheduled for February 7.
Sprint’s promising that the event will be “a lot of fun” but it is mum on whether Blaine plans relive his Times Square encasement in a block of ice or his vertigo stunt in Bryant Park.
Instead the operator, which has been working for years to narrow customer losses, will embark on “yet another industry first.”
Will it finally report net growth in contract customer numbers? Sign an iPhone distribution deal? Make the troublesome Nextel network disappear? Or simply unveil a new gadget?
It seems most likely that Sprint will unwrap a new high-speed wireless phone. So if you’ve any ideas on what kind of phone requires a magician to illustrate, do let us know.
Photograph: Reuters of David Blaine performing a stunt in Central Park in 2008
from Shop Talk:
Check Out Line: US online retailers dialing up mobile apps
Check out the increasing appetite for mobile applications among U.S. online retailers.
Nearly three-quarters (74 percent) of online retailers either already have or are developing a mobile strategy and one out of every five has a fully implemented mobile strategy already in place, according to a study from Forrester Research and Shop.org, the National Retail Federation's digital division.
"It's imperative for online retailers to stay on top of what their customers want and these days it's all mobile all the time," Scott Silverman, Shop.org executive director, said in a statement. "Mobile commerce has tremendous potential and will no doubt grow to become a significant part of overall sales volume in years to come."
"It's definitely the buzzword in the industry at the moment," Daniel Latev, retailing research manager at Euromonitor International, said of mobile commerce.
Retail executives agree, saying at the Reuters Consumer and Retail Summit last week that they are taking the potential of this growth opportunity seriously at last.
Earlier this year, Forrester forecast U.S. online retail sales would total $173 billion in 2010.
"Mobile investment is modest now, but we see that it will pick up in the future, especially among the biggest brands that have already invested significant amounts in their mobile operations," said Sucharita Mulpuru, a Forrester vice president and lead author of the study.
The end of the story…
……is the cash cow for Chinese company Shanda Literature Ltd, a subsidiary of Shanda Interactive Entertainment.
The company’s business model is simple: read the first half of a book online for free, and if you want to know the rest (which usually is the case if you have read that far) you need to pay for it. Revenues are split with the stories’ authors.
In China, this proves to be successful. According to Shanda Literature CEO Hou Xiaoqing, the company now has cash reserves of $1.8 billion, with 800,000 authors creating up to 80,000 new pages of content per day, he said at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
On web portals such as www.qidian.com and www.hongxiu.com, customers can chose from a huge variety of stories, and the best even make it into print.
Xiaoqing said the company has also teamed up with China Mobile to distribute literature via mobile phones, a business model that he said was “very promising”.
He added it was now for Shanda to explore whether those business ideas also work in other parts of the world, including Europe.
Could this be a business model for other publishing companies as well?
Vonage CEO sees no reason for iPhone Google Voice rejection
The US telecom regulator FCC has been looking into why Apple rejected an Internet telephony application from Google for inclusion in its iPhone application store. Responses from Google, Apple and AT&T, the exclusive U.S. iPhone carrier, are due today.
Along with Google Voice’s consumer fans, the outcome of the inquiry will be closely watched by other Internet telephone services such as eBay’s Skype. Apple approved a Skype app for iPhone but consumers can only make Skype calls when they are connected to a short-range wi-fi network and not via the AT&T cellular network. The head of another U.S. Internet telephony provider Vonage weighed in on the topic in an interview this week. Vonage plans to offer its own mobile communications application later this year.
Marc Lefar previously served as chief marketing officer of Cingular, now AT&T Mobility, where he helped put together the mobile operator’s iPhone deal with Apple, before becoming Vonage Chief Executive last year. Taking his previous experience in the wireless industry into acccount, Lefar said it was unclear to him why the Google Voice application was rejected for iPhone.
“These apps we’re talking about, to me … seem to be reasonable to allow, relative to the range of things that have already been put into the app store,” he said.
“I think its very hard to defend a unique service and to distinguish some services in the communications space (from) others if all they do is use software to be able to provide that service,” he said.
“We’re very interested to see what the FCC comes back with. We think the inquiry is completely appropriate,” he said. So is Lefar worried Vonage’s app will also face a tough time getting approval? “It’s not a concern,” he said “We understand what the competitive environment is and we think there’s ample opportunity to deliver software applications that deliver some of our services across a range of devices.” “We go into this with our eyes wide open.” said Lefar but declined comment on specific devices.
I don’t understand why Apple is doing this to themselves. Google has said they will simply make a web workaround if Apple blocks the app in stores (cf. http://www.newsy.com/videos/defending_th e_app_store), so why would Apple bother standing in the way?
from Commentaries:
Bracing for bar brawl in mobile phone emerging markets
The last thing that the complex negotiations between India's Bharti and South Africa's MTN Group to create the world's third largest mobile phone company needed is more complexity. The existing deal involving an intricate mix of cash and stock is further complicated by currency fluctuations and diverging growth rates between the maturing Indian market and the wide-open African one.
But if a third company, Zain of Kuwait, succeeds in starting up a full-scale bidding war for itself, the Bharti-MTN deal could come off the rails and fall apart. Zain's CEO told Kuwaiti daily Al-Rai on Monday that it is in talks with three major, but so-far unnamed telecom firms, including one from India. Last month, Zain said it was reviewing the possible sale of its far-flung African operations after French conglomerate Vivendi called off talks to buy a majority of Zain's African business. A Vivendi spokesman says nothing has changed since then. There's no word yet from other obvious suspects -- France Telecom or Vodafone -- on whether they are interested.
The most likely Indian bidder for Zain looks like Reliance Communications, India's distant No. 2 mobile operator to Bharti. There's history here, as Reliance tried to nab MTN a year ago. That move came after Bharti's first try to strike a deal with MTN, South Africa's second largest operator, fell apart over which company's management would end up controlling the combined entity.
At least temporarily, the only two parties we can rule out as bidders for Zain are Bharti and MTN. The two would be entirely likely candidates, except that they remain locked in exclusive talks with one another until the end of August. Zain's assets make it an obvious alternative should Bharti and MTN fail to make their belaboured third effort to strike a deal work after more than a year of trying.
There may be too much sheer complexity in merging India's most successful company with the diverse strengths of MTN, a big player from South Africa to Nigeria to Iran and Afghanistan. Both companies have corporate egos to match their roughly US$30 billion market capitalizations.
The outright acquisition of Zain's comparable assets looks a whole lot simpler. Clearly Zain, valued at around $20 billion on the Kuwaiti exchange, is trying to stoke a bidding war for itself by talking up mystery bidders. Coming just weeks ahead of the Bharti-MTN deadline, the Zain CEO's comments suggest he is trying to entice either Bharti or MTN or both into bidding for it.
Until recently, the two merger speculations appeared to be two separate events that happened to be taking place over some of the same battleground -- mobile phone markets across Africa and the Middle East. Maybe a good old fashioned frontier bar brawl is the easiest way of working this all out.
from Commentaries:
Humbled giants eye business phone market
LONDON, Aug 13 (Reuters) - Once they were warriors battling one another on the digital battlefield. Nowadays, Microsoft and Nokia are worriers, huddling together for comfort.
The world's top phone and software companies need each other to compete with Apple, Google and Blackberry-maker Research in Motion (RIM), whose products increasingly define what users expect from phones and charge premium prices in consequence.
In the market for so-called "smartphones", Deutsche Bank estimates Apple and RIM now take home more than half of all profits, despite producing less than a third of high-end mobile phones. Nokia held a 45 percent share of the smartphone market in June, according to Gartner Inc. (Table 2 in Gartner release)
The news this week that Nokia will feature Microsoft's office software -- features such as Word and Excel -- on phones aimed at business users is symbolic of what is possible rather than significant in itself. It fell short of predictions in the gadget trade press that Nokia might introduce phones running on Microsoft's own Windows Mobile software.
But that doesn't mean their collaboration should be dismissed. There's more to this budding relationship than meets the eye.
First and foremost, Microsoft and Nokia say they are taking on the Blackberry email-phone, a must have among corporate professionals. So far the they haven't done very much, for all the big talk. But they have pledged to make Microsoft Outlook work smoothly on Nokia phones.
This is crucial in overcoming Blackberry's key advantage -- the underlying software that companies rely on to securely manage corporate e-mail.
Nice article, Eric. Also in terms of what it elegantly understates – that nobody in the lucrative U.S. phone market is remotely satisfied with their phones or the cost of ancillary services the subscriber has to come up with.
There’s a lot of room for growth, if somebody would just listen to what the customer wants and deliver something like that instead of slowly bleeding users to death with costly add-ons and phony rebates instead of decent service at a fair price on a not-too ugly handheld device series.
Apple’s iPhone is a promiscuous lifestyle product unhappily married to the ogres of AT&T while flirting with the enterprise user market. Microsoft has Windows and Outhouse to contend with, tripping over its own necrotic brand software in the process of whatever they might try to do next. The Windows decal on any phone is a deterrent to buying it, at this point. I mean, what size of chip would one really need to store all the viruses and spam you’d be getting if one went down the MS route? That one hasn’t been invented yet.
At times like these, one might expect your last sentence to ring true with the makers and sellers of such devices. Hopefully, they’ll get the message soon.
from Commentaries:
Tech Links: Phones, more phones and communion wafers
Better luck next year for Android Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC has warned of a revenue shortfall, saying it has too many new phone models chasing too little revenue. Revenue growth will turn negative in 2009, instead of growing 10 percent, as the company had previously forecast.
Chief Executive Peter Chou says: "Momentum on both the Windows Mobile and Android platforms are also turning out to be weaker than expected."
HTC said it is boosting its marketing spending to more than 15 percent of revenue from 13.5 percent to fend off market leader Nokia and the Apple iPhone juggernaut.
My favorite line: "Investors have been relatively bearish on the company this year, with HTC's shares having risen about 36 percent so far, far lagging the 54 percent advance on the TAIEX share index."
Bharti looks ready to raise price for MTN Bharti Airtel and MTN have agreed to a month-long extension to merger talks to seal a deal that would create the world's third largest mobile phone company in subscriber terms.
This looks like the prelude to Bharti raising its bid for MTN, answering resistance to the deal by investors in the South African company. It all follows weeks of jockeying by Bharti to line up funding with banks and key shareholders.
The merger appears to be moving ahead despite signs of growing worker unrest in MTN's homeland. Over the weekend, South Africa's Communication Workers Union said workers at the fixed-line operations of Telkom SA will hold a two-day strike this week.
What I wish these phone maker companies would start working on is an Internet Cell Phone. One that uses the internet to communicate voice thru. They will compete against Cell Based Systems and this will force the Cell Companies to Lower their Prices to Decent Levels.. This current Contract/subscriber system is old and Monopolistic. If Google or Sony or or Somebody could develop this phone that worked as tranparently as the current cell system then the next wave of Telecommunications could begin and Give these Cell Companies LOTS of Competition. Thus Lower Prices to the end user. Right now My next phone will be an Internet Based Phone NOT a Cell Phone.
How many phones is too many?
Most people have one phone or handheld device for work, and maybe another one for play. But how about 14?
That’s how many devices Google’s vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra has. They make it “very hard to get through the airport,” he joked.
We asked him and other executives in the mobile advertising industry what devices they use, after about an hour of a panel discussion on where mobile advertising is going at the Fortune Brainstorm: TECH conference.
Gundotra said he had only a few of his 14 devices with him.
“I have an Android, a BlackBerry and an iPhone with me and another device that I can’t talk about,” he said, adding his company wants to make sure that consumers have a good Google experience with any device that they choose. His email and calendar are synced on all devices, but he has pictures only on the Android. “If you call Google Voice, all 14 phones ring,” he joked.
It’s an Apple iPhone and a Blackberry for Omar Hamoui, chief executive of AdMob, one of the largest marketplaces for mobile advertisers. “I carry two because I use them quite differently,” he said. The iPhone is for anything involved with data and applications and the Blackberry, for email and calendar.
Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president and general manager of Intel Corp’s Ultra Mobility Group, said he uses a notebook, Blackberry for work-related applications and an iPhone for more personal use like Internet browsing.
The whole thought of carrying 14 phones is bit scary. Leaves us a lot to imagine about. Thanks for the post.
I attempted to email Representative Lee but his website would not allow me to email him because my zip code is not in his area of representation.