Digital Daily

Mobile Data Traffic: 3.6 Billion Gigabytes a Month by 2014

John Paczkowski — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 22:00:42 +0000

It’s a truism that mobile data traffic these days is growing at an extraordinary rate. But that doesn’t make the findings of mobile data growth by Cisco (CSCO) any less dramatic. According to the company’s Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Data Forecast, worldwide mobile data traffic could hit 40 exabytes by 2014, or 3.6 exabytes per month (see table below; click to enlarge).

3.6 billion gigabytes per month.

Astonishing. In the past year alone, the volume of mobile Web traffic spiked 160 percent to 90 petabytes per month. And it’s growing at a rate 2.4 times faster than global fixed broadband data traffic.

Interestingly, a lot of this growth is being driven by mobile video. Cisco’s study found that mobile video will represent 66 percent of all mobile data traffic by 2014, increasing 66-fold from 2009 to 2014. Something to consider as we wait for Apple’s (AAPL) iPad to arrive at market and for Apple to nail down that “Best of TV” iTunes subscription offering it has been working on.

Gmail Goes Social With Google Buzz

John Paczkowski — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 19:00:57 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Google Buzz Makes Gmail Less Socially Awkward

John Paczkowski — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 18:27:02 +0000

Can a microblogging twist on Gmail raise Google’s profile in social networking? We’ll soon find out. At an event at company headquarters today, Google announced Google Buzz, a new Twitteresque status update system for the email service that will allow users to share their everyday mundanities and inanities and follow those of selected contacts.

“A Google approach to sharing,” Buzz is designed to, in the words of Bradley Horowitz, VP of Product Management, “find the signal in the social networking noise.”

The service exists within Gmail and promises to bring the social network that Google (GOOG) says always existed beneath the email service to the surface.

“The stream of social messages has become a torrent,” said Horowitz. “There is no way to parse that amount of information that ranges from the ridiculous to the sublime. We think this has become a Google-scale problem.”

Hence, Buzz.

Buzz taps into the torrent via the sort-of feature set you’d expect: auto-following, which turns Gmail contact lists into social networks; public and private sharing options; support of the “@ reply” feature popularized by Twitter; and a feature called “Recommended Buzz” that allows users to endorse updates they enjoy. The service also strives to make it easy to enhance those updates with content from other sites–Flickr, Picasa, YouTube and, yes, Twitter (no Facebook, though–yet).

Buzz, which launches Tuesday, is closely tied to Google’s mobile ambitions. It will debut in concert with a Web app for Android and iPhone and an enhancement to Google Maps for Mobile that will use GPS data to associate public Buzz content posted from mobile phones with location.

Google is the latest search company to try to graft social-networking features onto email service. Yahoo did it last year by adding “status casting,” its variation on Twitter, to Yahoo Mail. That feature has been mostly ignored since its debut. Perhaps Google’s effort will fare a bit better. It is, perhaps, the one company with enough heft and market power to reasonably take on Facebook. But it won’t be easy: Facebook has some 400 million unique users. Gmail, about 176 million.

Still, embrace and extend. Embrace and extend.

No Verizon iPhone Until 2011?

John Paczkowski — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:44:48 +0000

Asked about Apple’s relationship with AT&T during a conference call in January, Apple COO Tim Cook described the carrier as “a great partner” and touted its plans to improve the performance of its wireless network.

“In the vast majority of locations, we think that iPhone customers are having a great experience from the research that we have done,” Cook said. “As you know, AT&T has acknowledged that they are having some issues in a few cities and they have very detailed plans to address these. We have reviewed these plans and we have very high confidence they will make significant progress towards fixing them.”

That reiteration of Apple’s (AAPL) support for AT&T (T) and its decision to debut the iPad on the carrier’s network are fueling speculation that AT&T may hold on to its iPhone exclusive far longer than anyone is expecting. Indeed, in a note to clients today, Barclays Capital analyst Vijay Jayant suggests that the arrangement will last through the summer, perhaps to year’s end.

“Launch of Apple’s iPad on AT&T’s network is a vote of confidence in AT&T’s network by the equipment maker,” Jayant writes. “While iPad sales are unlikely to materially impact wireless revenues in the short term, selecting AT&T to launch its second major communications product reflects Apple’s bias for the global GSM platform and the prospects of AT&T’s network capability. Moreover, it could suggest the iPhone exclusivity may continue, at least through the end of 2010.”

That’s great news for AT&T, if it should prove true. And not simply because it gives the company more time to enjoy the benefits of iPhone exclusivity, but because it gives it nearly a year to improve its network before exclusivity expires. And if AT&T manages to do a good job, the carrier’s iPhone subscribers will presumably be less likely to flee for another network first chance they get.

Reminder: Microsoft's WinMo on 18 Percent of U.S. Smartphones

John Paczkowski — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:00:33 +0000

Here’s a metric to consider in advance of The Mobile World Congress next week and the likely debut of Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 7 operating system: As widely maligned as it is, Windows Mobile was still running on 18 percent of U.S. smartphones at the end of 2009, according to comScore (SCOR). This despite our continuing fascination with Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone, Palm’s (PALM) Pre and Pixi, and Android phones like Google’s (GOOG) Nexus One and Motorola’s (MOT) Droid.

Windows Mobile has the third largest smartphone market presence in the U.S., after Research in Motion (RIMM), which controls 41.6 percent of the market, and Apple, which controls 25.3 percent. (See table above; click to enlarge.)

Worth remembering because Microsoft’s (MSFT) portion is far larger than Palm’s share, which fell to 6.1 percent in the December quarter, and Google’s share, which though doubled over the year prior, was still just 5.2 percent.

Adobe: Flash for Mac Is Getting Better–Really!

John Paczkowski — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:51:16 +0000

“We are ready to enable Flash in the browser on [the iPhone and iPad] if and when Apple chooses to allow that for its users, but to date we have not had the required cooperation from Apple to make this happen.”

– Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch

Apple’s refusal to support Flash on the iPhone–and soon the iPad as well–might not be a death knell for Flash, but it will surely hasten its decline, if Adobe isn’t careful.

Certainly, the fact that the iPhone’s lack of Flash hasn’t really hurt it suggests that Flash may not be quite as important for the Web as Adobe (ADBE) would like us all to think. And now, with some new video players ably demonstrating the promise of HTML5–like this one–the company is clearly worried about Apple’s (AAPL) unflagging exclusion of Flash and CEO Steve Jobs’s recent, and quite vicious, dismissal of it.

So much so that Adobe is publicly promising to improve Flash’s performance on Mac systems. In comments appended to a blog post about the iPad’s lack of Flash support, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch said his company is working to improve Flash performance on the Mac.

“Flash Player on Windows has historically been faster than the Mac, and it is for the most part the same code running in Flash for each operating system,” he wrote. “We have and continue to invest significant effort to make Mac OS optimizations to close this gap, and Apple has been helpful in working with us on this.”

Elaborating, Lynch catalogs progress to date. “Vector graphics rendering in Flash Player 10 now runs almost exactly the same in terms of CPU usage across Mac and Windows, which is due to this work. In Flash Player 10.1 we are moving to CoreAnimation, which will further reduce CPU usage and we believe will get us to the point where Mac will be faster than Windows for graphics rendering….With Flash Player 10.1, we are optimizing video rendering further on the Mac and expect to reduce CPU usage by half, bringing Mac and Windows closer to parity for video.”

Welcome news. But enough to prompt Apple to suddenly reverse course and begin supporting Flash on its mobile devices? That seems unlikely. Apple’s repudiation of Flash on the iPhone and iPad seems–to me, anyway–quite a bit like its repudiation of floppy drives in the first iMacs. It’s a move that inevitably generates great controversy and criticism, but ultimately proves to be ahead of its time.

Unhappy Hipsters

John Paczkowski — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:32:20 +0000

The reindeer had tolerated the cheetah’s posturing — up until today.

iPad Pricing: How Low Can You Go, Apple?

John Paczkowski — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:00:31 +0000

The iPad’s lower-than-expected price may go lower still if the device doesn’t perform as well at market as Apple hopes. Recounting his recent meeting with some executives from the company in a research note issued last night, Credit Suisse analyst Bill Shope said Apple is evidently quite willing to get even more aggressive with the iPad’s $499 to $829 pricing.

“While it remains to be seen how much traction the iPad gets initially, management noted that it will remain nimble (pricing could change if the company is not attracting as many customers as anticipated),” Shope wrote.

Now, it’s a truism that most companies are open to price cuts on any product if they need to increase sales. That said, this is an interesting disclosure coming from Apple (AAPL) execs, particularly so far in advance of the iPad’s actual debut. Certainly, it calls to mind the company’s decision to slash the price of the iPhone by $200 two months after it went on sale and the early-adopter rebate it was forced to issue afterward. It seems odd, then, that Apple execs would even hint at the possibility of an early price cut lest they give folks already on the fence about buying the first iteration of the device more reason to stay there.

Unless they’re planning a prerelease price cut to really juice sales. Remember, Apple reportedly stands to make about a 42.9 percent margin on the iPad, so there’s presumably plenty of room for the company to hit an even more aggressive price point that would really put the device in the netbook range.

SAP CEO Steps Down

John Paczkowski — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:00:20 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Wafer-Thin Mint, Monsieur Ellison? Oracle Acquires AmberPoint

John Paczkowski — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:44:23 +0000

Its merger with Sun Microsystems finally closed, Oracle (ORCL) is moving on to new acquisitions. The first: AmberPoint, a service-oriented-architecture management outfit that the company says fits well with its Fusion Middleware offering.

“The combination of Oracle and AmberPoint is expected to extend Oracle’s leadership in Fusion Middleware Solutions and provide customers with advanced capabilities in SOA Governance and SOA Management through a comprehensive, end-to-end SOA Management and Business Transaction Management offering,” Richard Sarwal, Oracle’s SVP of Product Development, said in a letter to customers.

“Adding AmberPoint’s capabilities to Oracle’s solutions is expected to provide customers with more agility and visibility into their business processes,” Sarwal continued, “enabling increased control and performance of critical applications.”

Terms of Oracle’s (ORCL) acquisition, which is expected to close in the first half of 2010, were not disclosed. Below, Sarwal’s letter in full.

On February 8, 2010 Oracle announced it has agreed to acquire AmberPoint. AmberPoint’s solutions help organizations diagnose and resolve issues in application performance and business transactions. Acknowledged as a leader in SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) Management, AmberPoint has been recognized for its innovation in SOA Management, Business Transaction Management and run-time SOA Governance. The combination strengthens Oracle Fusion Middleware solutions to further enable customers to reduce IT costs and improve customer satisfaction. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2010.

Effective SOA Management has become increasingly important as organizations seek to improve business processes and application performance. Management of transactions such as account provisioning and insurance claims processing typically requires multiple applications to work together. The complexity is further magnified since these applications are often developed, deployed and managed by different teams. Having an effective SOA Management solution in place can accelerate the diagnosis and resolution of issues in application performance and business transactions before the business is impacted.

The combination of Oracle and AmberPoint is expected to extend Oracle’s leadership in Fusion Middleware Solutions and provide customers with advanced capabilities in SOA Governance and SOA Management through a comprehensive, end-to-end SOA Management and Business Transaction Management offering. Adding AmberPoint’s capabilities to Oracle’s solutions is expected to provide customers with more agility and visibility into their business processes enabling increased control and performance of critical applications.

In addition to AmberPoint’s technology solutions, AmberPoint’s employees have significant domain expertise in SOA Management, and are expected to join Oracle after the transaction closes. We are dedicated to maintaining and improving the quality of innovation, support and service you have come to expect from Oracle by continuing to develop and offer market-leading solutions that are complete, integrated and standards based. As a leading provider of Oracle Fusion Middleware solutions, we look forward to continuing to provide our customers the best and most comprehensive SOA offering that improves performance and lowers your organizations’ IT costs.

Thank you for your continued support.
Sincerely,
Richard Sarwal
Senior Vice President, Product Development

Here's Hoping Google "Speech-to-Speech" Translation Not as Hilariously Inaccurate as Google Voice Translation

John Paczkowski — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:43:02 +0000

Google has built up quite a business scanning the written word for contextual advertising opportunities. Now it hopes to do the same for the spoken word as well. The company is reportedly developing a real-time translation technology for our phones.

“We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time,” Franz Och, Google’s (GOOG) head of translation services, told the New York Times. “Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that’s what we’re working on.”

A worthy goal, and admirable too, since such a technology, were it to work well, would really herald an end to language barriers. That said, given the hilarious inaccuracy of Google Voice’s visual voicemail transcriptions, I’d say a truly usable speech-to-speech translation service is quite a bit further off than Och claims.

SAP Board to CEO: Auf Wiedersehen, Sweetheart

John Paczkowski — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:01:31 +0000

Leo Apotheker has resigned as CEO of SAP AG after the German software company’s supervisory board declined to renew his contract. SAP offered no reason for the departure, insisting it was by “mutual consent,” though this hardly seems the case given the fate of Apotheker’s contract.

Voluntary or otherwise, Apotheker’s exit had been rumored for months. Under his leadership, SAP (SAP) posted its first annual drop in revenue since 2003 and announced the first mass layoffs in the company’s history. That said, Apotheker hasn’t had an easy time of it; righting a company like SAP in a down market is a near Sisyphean challenge by any measure.

As Ray Wang notes over at Enterprise Advocates, “Though a seasoned executive with over 20 years with SAP, Leo was in the wrong time wrong place….He entered a down market while in charge of a sinking ship. Low morale among the Walldorf engineering team, the issue with Enterprise Support and maintenance, and uncontrollable poor quarterly performance proved to be factors beyond his control. Customers over the past 2 to 3 years began to wonder how to tap SAP’s innovation. A clear need emerged for having more technologists at the helm.”

Apotheker will be succeeded immediately by two co-CEOs: Jim Hagemann Snabe, head of product development, and Bill McDermott, head of field organization. Their ascension to the top spot returns SAP to the co-CEO structure the company used before Apotheker took the reins alone just seven months ago.

QOTD

John Paczkowski — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 11:53:36 +0000

QOTD

“With the iPad pointing to even greater demand for mobile broadband on the horizon, we must ensure that network congestion doesn’t choke off a service that consumers clearly find so appealing, or frustrate mobile broadband’s ability to keep us competitive in the global broadband economy.”

– Phil Bellaria, director of scenario planning for the Federal Communications Commission, and John Leibovitz, deputy chief of the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau, wonder about the iPad’s impact on the country’s broadband network.

Weekend Update 02.06.10–The Winter Ain't Over Edition

Drake Martinet — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 20:30:42 +0000

Torrential rain in the West and a blizzard of death in the East can mean only one thing: Using a fat rodent to divine the weather is at at least as accurate as $100 million geosynchronous weather satellites. So as AllThingsD battens down the hatches on both coasts, Weekend Update is here to be the perfect accompaniment to hot tea and power-outage candles. So charge up the laptop while you can, and read on for a full week’s tech trends straight from our intrepid team.

Boomtown was in the front row when game exec Dan Rosensweig left the stage at Guitar Hero to take over as CEO of Chegg, the Web’s top textbook renter. Rosensweig had only been strumming along at Guitar Hero since March, so the move was unexpected. Kara did the full-disclosure dance with AOL’s earnings report. Hit her post for all sorts of great source documents from the new republic of Aol. (AOL). She closed out the week with a thinky piece on Facebook and what it could do in the news aggregation biz. With nigh 400 million users, the number of traded links just to Rick Astley music must be staggering. This one is worth the read.

From deep in his snow-covered technology bunker, Walt let fly a Personal Technology column on two tiny new laptops with a lot to offer. Dell’s (DELL) M11x, the latest release from its Alienware line, is a move to pack lots of power into a tiny package. Sony’s (SNE) Vaio X on the other hand, is all about the lightness. The Dell got high marks for performance, even if the battery life wasn’t as killer as the graphics. The Sony, however, received a rare Mossberg superlative. Being the lightest laptop Walt has ever tested does come with some drawbacks, of course. Chief among them was measly battery life. Mossberg’s Mailbox was short but potent this week. Walt gave some quick clarification to an iPad question and reassured readers that YouTube will be available on the device, even if Flash won’t. He then gave some no-nonsense advice about dumping the older IE6 in favor of a newer, safer, and more supported browser. Katie got to do a little online shopping this week in her review of Flit.com, a Web service that allows you to search multiple stores at once and aims to streamline the shopping experience. She liked the novel way Flit deals you out to store’s Web sites but lets you see their offerings before you click over. No word on if whether or not she bought those black heels she was looking for.

John brought some great news to Google Nexus One users with a post early this week about a meaty software upgrade. Just like that, Google (GOOG) flipped the switch on multitouch functionality in the device. We can now add pinch-zoom to the list of Googleable words. It seems that 12 percent of Americans had something in common with Monster.com (MWW) this week; they were both looking for job listings. Monster purchased Yahoo’s HotJobs for $225 million cash. We drove by earlier today, and Carol Bartz still has Yahoo (YHOO) Games and Yahoo Shopping out on the lawn next to the “for sale” sign. John rounded out the week with a little crystal ball-gazing about the future of Apple and TV. The speculation is centered around Apple’s (AAPL) recent moves in the TV space and how the iPad might play a role. We can add TV to the list of things the iPad might be.

MediaMemo always gets to cover those wonderfully chewy stories where the tech sector and the mediascape bump and grind. This week Peter opened up with a post about YouTube’s most recent foray into legitimate movies. The Google-owned video giant offered up paid views of Sundance films and considered the effort an overall success. One of the big what-ifs of 2009 was actually more of a “when,” as in, “when will Hulu start costing money?” Peter reported that a Disney (DIS) exec said the decision hasn’t yet been made. Weekend Update will be stocking up on old episodes of “The A-Team” and “Another World” in case Hulu finally puts up the wall. Peter rounded out the week with the answer to a question that’s been on our minds for some time now; will we live in a world with a publicly traded porn Web site. When investors didn’t seem to be hot for FriendFinder Networks, the company canceled its pending IPO. Weekend Update supposes that porn will just have to remain the Web’s biggest nonindustry.

Put on your rain slickers or snow shoes, depending on where you live, and enjoy the winter weekend. Or, you could stay indoors and play some Guitar Hero, futz with a new laptop, hunt for a job, shop for some shoes online and watch TV at Hulu. That’s what we’ve been doing.

iPad TV?

John Paczkowski — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 00:31:38 +0000

Could Apple’s (AAPL) future as a multichannel video distributor lie not with AppleTV but with the iPad? Might the “best of TV” iTunes subscription offering the company has been pitching to TV networks since last November be primarily intended for that device, which Apple is positioning as the successor to its sleeper AppleTV platform? With company executives still dismissing AppleTV as a “hobby” and TV itself becoming a more personal, intimate experience, it’s worth thinking about.

Consider this scenario from Bernstein Research analyst Craig Moffett.

Imagine a portable set top box, but with its own killer screen. When in the home, it would be docked in a cradle connected to iTunes via a wired broadband pipe. Navigation of programming guides and iTunes listings would occur on the iPad, using an intuitive touch interface. Output would go directly to the wide-screen TV on the wall…until you left the house. Then, you’d simply pop the device out of its cradle and take it with you. And in the process, you’d be taking your TV with you as well. A 3G (and eventually 4G) wireless connection would allow you to keep watching live TV in the back of the car or cab. Once you got on the airplane you could choose from a library of your favorite shows saved on your DVR…which also happens to be a half-inch thick ergonomically gorgeous high definition tilt-sensitive screen that fits comfortably in your hands.

A dockable, portable set-top box with LED-backlit widescreen display? Seems a bit of a stretch at this point. And it would be enormously bandwidth-intensive. But it’s not entirely inconceivable, is it?

UPDATE: Mark Sigal recently made a similar observation over at O’Reilly Radar, using MLB’s iPad app as an example:

Similarly, MLB (Major League Baseball) showcased their MLB app, which overlays graphics, information feeds, video clips and live game programming in a way that is simultaneously immersive, interactive and highly entertaining. It is both suggestive of a media-centric killer app for the IPad and a bellwether for the future of TV Anywhere, yet another reason that I believe Apple’s ambitions with respect to Apple TV remain very much alive.