Interesting...Whats drives higher retention rates for some of the other SN sites like Facebook and MySpace ? Larger part of your network being there, larger set of apps, more geared to a PC/laptop format ?

To be a Twitter is to be a quitter

30/04/2009 - by TelecomTV One

It is becoming evident that Twitter is something of a flash in the pan. New evidence published today by the US research house Nielsen Online shows that in excess of 60 per cent of Twitterers are fly-by-night characters who use the technology in an unsustainable burst of over-enthusiasm for a few weeks and then abandon the free social networking site in less than a month, writes Martyn Warwick.

David Martin, the VP of Primary Research at Nielsen Online says, "Twitter's audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month's users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 per cent."

And that lowly figure is actually an improvement on the retention rate achieved before the technology was taken up by "celebrities" (many of whom, it transpires, actually employ ghost writers to churn out their allegedly spontaneous guff). As David Martin says, "For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter languished at below 30 per cent retention."

Now, given Twitter's undeniable if erratic popularity, the company's future would seem likely to be dependent on a never-ending supply of new users signing-up to give Twitter a go even as the majority of last months afficionados churn away to another fad.

This will be a difficult trick to pull off. Twitter itself won't release usage figures but Nielsen Online estimates that the site had in excess of seven million unique visitors in February this year. That figure was somewhere in the region of half a million at the end of February 2008.

Growth has been impressive but as David Martin points out, if only 40 per cent of people stay loyal and continue to use the site, long-term growth will be limited to 10 per cent - at best.

He says, "There simply won't be enough new users to make up for defecting ones after a certain point. Twitter has enjoyed a nice ride over the last few months, but it will not be able to sustain its meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty." And therein lies the problem - how to convince fickle fans to stay with the Twitter site for the long haul.

To support his argument, Mr. Martin makes reference to other social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace and points out that both have massively more users than Twitter and retention rates above the 70 per cent mark.

That said, the Neilsen Online research cannot be described as fully comprehensive as of those many users that get into Twitter by the back door - via increasingly popular third-party applications - are absent from the statistics. Were they to be added to the equation things might well look different - but we don't know because they weren't.

Another validation of the fact that context services are increasingly becoming mainstream

Location Based Services where are you ?

30/04/2009 - by TelecomTV One

It's no surprise that location based services are tipped for greater and greater things.. the question is, who will control them? By Ian Scales.

Location based services for mobiles (and increasingly netbooks and MIDs) are clearly a key enabler for next-generation mobile services - from location-specific advertising, map-search and navigation through to whatever the next step is in social networking: it will probably all rely in part or in full on some sort of underlying geographical positioning service.

But according to researchers, Strategy Analytics, there's going to be a big battle for control and revenues.

Are location services best controlled from the network (and the network operator), the handset (and the handset vendor) or the Internet based service (the Google).

According to Strategy Analytics operators have so far focused on navigation, people locators and 'find the nearest' services, but have struggled to drive broad adoption in any of them.

At the same time Nokia is moving strongly into the area, acquiring several players, including mapping data provider, Navteq. Given its huge market share in handsets, Nokia is clearly in a good place to compete by bringing these capabilities together.

While Google, with its strengthening position in maps and geo apps and its moves into the smartphone market with Android (where GPS is another API on the handset), is also sitting pretty.

Both these threats, from different parts of the forest, are capable of disintermediating operators from the location services value chain, says Strategy Analytics.

In whatever way the power play works itself out, the good news is that a huge market will form as GPS handset ownership and data plan adoption grows with the increasing take-up of smartphones and mobile broadband.

The analysts say growth in location-based service will ensure the current $650 million market will hit $8 billion by 2013 and over 80 per cent of those location revenues will come from location-enabled search and voice-guided navigation applications.

Another whopping month. Question is how long more will this run with upgrades projected to (under normal economic conditions) surpass new adds 2010 onwards ?

India Sets Telecoms Subs add Record

April 21, 2009 | Catherine Haslam

India's mobile operators added a record 15.64 million new connections during March this year, taking the total number of activated wireless lines to 391.76 million, according to the latest figures issued by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) .

This set a new high, just beating the former record of 15.4 million set in January 2009. It also represents a 14 percent increase on the total added during February.

And, remarkably, the number of fixed-line connections also increased, though only by 230,000, to take the total to 37.96 million. That reverses a long-term trend of month-on-month decline, as Indian consumers have been abandoning their fixed lines and relying on their mobile services.

The growing popularity of fixed broadband (any line delivering a downlink speed greater than 256 kbit/s) appears to be one of the reasons for the reverse: India's fixed-line operators added 370,000 new broadband connections during March to take the total to 6.22 million.

That's still a very low figure for a country with a population approaching 1.2 billion: Mass market broadband is only likely to take off once high-speed wireless data services are broadly available, but that won't happen until the much delayed 3G and WiMax spectrum auctions take place.

In total, India now has 429.7 million telephone connections, giving the country a teledensity of almost 37 percent, up from 35.65 percent at the end of February.

Of the mobile operators, Reliance Communications Ltd. reported the highest number of additions at just over 3 million, closely followed by Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. (BSNL) and Vodafone Essar .

Bharti Airtel Ltd. , the country's largest mobile operator, was a close fourth with 2.81 million customer additions.

The table below shows the relative market positions of the country's operators at the end of March 2009.

Table 1: India's Mobile Operator Ranking by Subscribers

Overall Ranking	Operator	Subscribers added in March '09	Total subscribers as of end March '09	Market Share as of end March '09*
1	Bharti Airtel	2,808,277	93,923,248	23.97%
2	Reliance Communications	3,025,809	72,666,192	18.55%
3	Vodafone Essar	2,848,096	68,768,998	17.55%
4	BSNL	2,902,237	52,144,234	13.31%
5	IDEA Cellular	1,419,347	38,889,457	9.93%
6	Tata Teleservices	1,254,940	35,121,964	8.97%
7	Aircel		18,478,325	4.72%
8	MTNL	1,001,363	4,482,512	1.14%
9	Spice Telecom (now part of Idea Cellular but still reporting connections separately)	84,839	4,133,342	1.06%
10	Loop Telecom (including BPL in Mumbai now rebranded Loop)	91,027	2,164,211	0.55%
11	Sistema Shyam	101266	599,801	0.15%
12	HFCL Infotel	-1,544	388,285	0.01%
*Figures have been rounded to nearest decimal place and therefore do not add up to exactly 100%. Source: TRAI

Reliance, predominantly a CDMA service provider, has made significant inroads during the first quarter of 2009, adding 11.3 million customers, compared to 5.3 million during the previous three-month period, according to the company's own figures. It cites the successful launch of its nationwide GSM service, which began on December 30, 2008, as the main driver of its additional growth. (See Reliance Launches National GSM, Reliance Borrows $750M for Huawei Gear, and Reliance Gets GSM Spectrum.)

Phenomenal ! Looks like a count down to a NASA launch !!

Games continues to be the lead segment with 14 of the top 20 paid apps and 6 of the top 20 free apps being games.

Community participation is highlighted by the fact that it is not just big well-known brands that are making it into the top 20.

Apple Starts Countdown To 1 Billion App Downloads; Reveals Top 20 Of All Time

By Tricia Duryee - Fri 10 Apr 2009

Apple has launched a clock that is rapidly ticking up to mark the one-billionth iPhone application download. The countdown (or rather, count up) reveals the lightening fast pace that applications are being downloaded from the nine-month old mobile store.

This morning, the count stands at 929 million downloads, which is moving so quickly, it could hit 1 billion within 10 days. From the looks of it, about 100 apps are being downloaded every second—that’s 6,000 every minute, 360,000 every hour and 8.6 million a day. Everyone knew that thousands of downloads were occurring every month, but this visual really puts it into context. I’m sure every mobile platform is envious of this pace.

In addition, Apple also revealed a list of the top 20 paid and free applications of all time. The list differs from a comScore report released earlier this week that listed the top 25, but did not break them out by free and paid. It also was only able to see which applications people downloaded through their PC.

Apple’s entire list, and some high-level findings, can be found after the jump.

—Top Apps: While comScore said Tap Tap Revenge was the top app, Apple said the top paid app was Vivendi’s Crash Bandicoot (which is currently $5.99) and the top free app is Facebook. Tap Tap ranked fourth, according to Apple.

—Games: Games was the leading category comprising of 14 of the top 20 paid apps and six of the top 20 free apps.

—Entertainment and Music: After games, the top two categories are entertainment and music. The Koi Pond is the top ranking paid entertainment app, and Pandora and Shazam rank high as two free music apps.

—Price: Prices for these apps have likely changed over time, but currently, the most common price is 99 cents with half of the top 20 charging that much. The second most common price is $4.99, with prices ranging as high as $5.99.

—Brands: It is not just big well-known brands that are making it into the top 20. For instance, the infamous Ethan Nicholas, who quit his day job to develop iPhone apps full-time, hit No. 19 with his iShoot game. However, most of the top game titles come from brands, such as Vivendi , PopCap and EA. Brands also dominate the free category, with Facebook at No. 1, but one-offs, like Flashlight also doing well.

This could potentially open up a host of possibilities of how the mobile phone becomes even more central to many more aspects of our life. Good to see tremendous progress in radio, memory and display. The gap area, where we haven't seen much innovation, remains battery life

New Bluetooth Spec Will Enable Speedy Transfers Of Photos, Videos

By Tricia Duryee - Mon 13 Apr 2009

A new version of Bluetooth is set to come out later this month that will allow users to quickly and easily transfer large multimedia files, like a DVD or hundreds of photos, over a wireless connection, reports mobile-tech-today.com. With these capabilities, you can imagine a host of new reasons to use Bluetooth, including connecting a mobile device to a TV, a computer monitor, or speakers to stream video, music, or other large files.

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group, which publishes new versions of the technology, said those are the kinds of functions it envisions with version 3.0, which will be unveiled April 21. Until then, it’s not saying when it will be available to consumers, or whether it will require a new device or will be backwards compatible with older Bluetooth devices.

More on how it works after the jump…

Mobile-tech-today.com reported Bluetooth is capable of achieving higher speeds by integrating Wi-Fi to transfer larger files. It wrote: “The association’s two-pronged design neatly addresses the issue of backward compatibility by taking a classic Bluetooth connection ‘and allowing it to jump on top of the already present 802.11 radio, when necessary, to send bulky entertainment data faster’.” Then, when the Wi-Fi radio is no longer needed, it returns to normal operation to save battery life. This will work even when a Wi-Fi signal is not present.

Skype for iPhone hits 2M downloads

Interesting to see how the operators will respond this time round ? Could voice commoditisation and spectrum shortages in many markets make operators have a change of heart and work with Skype given they benefit from data as current model which only leverages WiFi totally bypasses the operators

Skype for iPhone hits 2M downloads

GSM Mobile Business Briefing, April 14, 2008

Skype claims to have hit 2 million downloads of its 'Skype for iPhone' software since the mobile VoIP client debuted on Apple's App Store on 31 March. Writing on the VoIP company's official blog, Skype's Peter Parkes said it is currently seeing an average two to three downloads a second. The 1 million milestone was reached within two days of launch, establishing the software as one of the fastest-downloaded iPhone apps ever. Parkes added that many of those downloading the application were new Skype users. He noted also that Skype was "working tirelessly" on a new release of the iPhone software.

The current version of Skype for iPhone can only be accessed via Wi-Fi hotspots and not via standard mobile networks, but recent reports suggest that some mobile operators are considering blocking Skype's VoIP traffic over their networks. Skype already offers a version of its software for Microsoft's Windows Mobile and Google's Android platform, while a version for the BlackBerry is expected next month. Meanwhile, the New York Times reported over the weekend that Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis have contacted several private-equity firms over buying back the company from eBay. The online auction giant bought the company in 2005 for US$2.6 billion, but wrote down the value of the purchase in 2007. Skype is currently valued at around US$1.7 billion.

Tipping point for the payments industry globally ? Some traction for much touted and long delayed NFC technology.

Visa Makes NFC Mobile Point-of-Sale Payments Commercially Available

Cellular News
April 9, 2009

­Credit card merchant, Visa has announced the launch of the world’s first commercial Visa mobile payments service for point-of-sale transactions using Near Field Communications (NFC) technology. The service marks the first time consumers can purchase an NFC-enabled mobile device off the shelf and use that device to make Visa payWave-enabled transactions at the point-of-sale instead of using their payment card.

“We believe that Visa’s NFC mobile payment launch in Malaysia signals a tipping point for the payments industry globally as we move from mobile payment pilots to commercial availability,” said Elizabeth Buse, Global Head of Product at Visa. “Malaysia has historically been an early adopter of new payment technologies. The launch of Visa’s first commercial NFC program in Malaysia is based on Visa's experience gained from undertaking extensive pilot activities around the globe and is something Visa plans to replicate in other places around the world.”

Maxis – the largest wireless carrier in Malaysia with more than 11 million subscribers, Nokia and Maybank – a leading financial institution in Malaysia have teamed with Visa to offer Visa payWave on mobile devices.

The service, launched today, allows Maybank Visa account holders to simply wave their NFC-enabled Nokia 6212 classic handset in front of a contactless reader to complete a secure Visa transaction in a matter of seconds.

Maybank Visa account holders can download their Visa payWave credit account details directly to their Nokia 6212 classic handset over the Maxis wireless network. Once the account has been personalized on the phone, account holders can then begin to make purchases at any one of the 1,800 merchant outlets that currently accept Visa payWave in Malaysia.

The contactless chip embedded in the device will also power a number of additional functions, including a contactless transit application that enables Malaysian commuters to pay for charges while using metropolitan transit systems, bus terminals, highway toll gates and car park facilities at more than 3,000 contactless payment touch points throughout Malaysia. Maxis has branded these mobile payment services under the name Maxis FastTap.

Dr Nikolai Dobberstein, Maxis’ Senior Vice President of Strategy and New Businesses said, "Maxis has been a long-standing partner of Visa in Malaysia and is excited to be the first to market with a commercial Visa payWave service on mobile devices. Our collaboration with Visa is part of our wider NFC strategy which includes multiple applications including mass transit, road tolling, parking, mobile marketing through smart posters and of course retail payment through Visa payWave. We see this announcement as important not only for consumers in Malaysia but for the broader financial services and telecom industries because it serves as a proof point that win-win business models are possible in mobile commerce."

Like Apple, Amazon, Wal-Mart change music prices

Wonder how long these prices will hold given the business model being pursued by the likes of Spotify

Like Apple, Amazon, Wal-Mart change music prices

Like Apple's iTunes, Amazon and Wal-Mart modify pricing on online music stores

Rachel Metz, AP News

Apr 08, 2009

Apple's iTunes Store isn't the only one that has adjusted prices for its digital song downloads recently: Changes are showing up at Amazon's and Wal-Mart's online music stores, too.

Apple Inc., the dominant digital music retailer on the Internet, shifted Tuesday from selling all songs for 99 cents apiece to a tiered pricing model where songs cost 69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29 each. Recording companies are choosing the prices.

Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple also eliminated the copy-protection technology that limited users' abilities to copy and play songs on devices other than Apple's own iPods.

On the same day Apple made its changes, Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s online music store began selling tunes for $1.24, 94 cents and 64 cents apiece. Previously, they cost 74 cents and 94 cents apiece.

In an e-mail, Walmart.com spokesman Ravi Jariwala said the pricing adjustments are "reflective of new costs set by the music industry."

Elsewhere on the Web, Seattle-based online retailer Amazon.com Inc. is also selling individual song downloads for as much as $1.29. Most songs currently cost $1.29, 99 cents, 89 cents or 69 cents each. Amazon did not say when it began selling songs for $1.29; when the store first opened in September 2007, songs sold for 89 cents and 99 cents.

Wal-Mart and Amazon downloads had already been free of copy protection.