Only 14% of respondents to a recent Sage Research survey said that their Enterprise Instant Messaging plans were impacted by Yahoo! and AOL announcements that they will drop their enterprise instant messaging products. Meanwhile, 82% said the provider actions had no impact on their EIM plans. The analysts surveyed 96 IT decision makers at U.S. businesses with over 100 employees.
A recent survey of 473 enterprise buyers by the Yankee Group of Boston revealed that in the next 12 months, 75% plan on investing in the technology and staffing necessary to enable a service-oriented architecture. Yankee’s survey results point out that the greatest investments in SOA are coming from the wireless telecom and manufacturing markets (78%), while financial services (77%) and health care (71%) are not far behind.
In-Stat/MDR projects that, with the technology’s perceived ability to fill the high-bandwidth gap left by Wi-Fi in the home networking space, UWB node/chipset shipments will experience an emerging market compound annual growth rate of over 400% from 2005 to 2008. As UWB rolls out, it faces no serious competing technologies, since alternatives only offer slower ways of accomplishing data transfers, with speeds that are 1% to 10% of a 480Mbps UWB solution. There is really no wireless technology, which is currently available and standardized, that offers robust multimedia transport of multiple digital video streams.
The prices of most telecom services have fallen by 10% every year even while their adoption increased by around 15%. This makes it difficult to create a defendable and profitable niche within the market because dozens of competitors can deliver the same service. Telecom carriers see a way out of the situation with service bundling. Apart from reducing customer churn, it enables carriers to provide commoditized services at prices higher than the market value. Bundling can also help save costs in areas of bill statement creation, paper, printing, and postage.
More than a dozen companies currently offer VOIP services to U.S. residential customers. Most offer unlimited local and long-distance calls for $30 per month or less, with some as low as $19.95, although those fees do not include the broadband Internet connection that VOIP requires. Comparable plans for traditional service from the dominant U.S. telephone carriers typically cost about $60 to $70 per month. The rise of consumer VOIP has been driven by the growing number of U.S. households with broadband Internet access, as well as steep declines in the cost of the infrastructure necessary to run VOIP services.
Vonage, a New Jersey start-up, was able to garner more than 200,000 subscribers for about $103 mln in venture capital and raised another $105 mln last month for expanding into foreign markets. While industry experts estimate the current residential VOIP market has less than 1 mln subscribers, they expect sharp growth starting in 2005 as large cable companies such as Comcast Corp. roll out their VOIP services. Communications consulting firm Yankee Group forecasts VOIP services will win 17.5 mln residential users by 2008.
Wireless broadband networks will connect almost 287,000 Australian subscribers by 2008, a 5x increase on the 25,000 expected to get their high speed internet over the air this year, IDC predicts.
Claria alone has about 29 million users running its adware products on their computers, according to comScore MediaMetrix, an Internet research firm. That compares with 1.5 million users in early 2000.
Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) said worldwide sales of semiconductors rose to $18.2 bln in August, exceeding expectations of $18 bln and 34.2% YTY. The August worldwide sales figure announced by SIA is an average of the actual sales figures for June, July and August. The July 2004 average sales figure was $18 bln, which was up 37.9% from the $13 bln reported in July 2003.
Oprah Winfrey gave away 276 Pontiac G6 cars to her studio audience. The cars were donated by Pontiac, which coughed up over $7 million but got a huge advertising bang for its buck since the story made headlines around the country (and is on the cover of the upcoming People magazine). According to comScore Networks visits to oprah.com jumped 800% from Monday to Tuesday as over 600,000 people logged on after seeing Oprah. Visitation to pontiac.com jumped 600% in the same period as over 140,000 people viewed the site, the company noted.
Gartner surveyed 5,000 online consumers last March. 30% of respondents had identities stolen online. 90% of those cases were in the last year, and 70% occurred since September, 2003. In the second half of 2003, only 4% of hacker attacks were launched at e-commerce sites. In the first half of this year, 16% were targeted at e-commerce, making it the single most assaulted industry, according to Symantec.
Although Linux may be shipping on a growing number of PCs sold in the emerging markets of Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, about 80% of PCs shipped with the open source operating system this year will eventually run pirated versions of Windows, Gartner estimated. The high price of Windows may be driving vendors in countries like China and Russia to ship Linux on as many as 40% of their PCs, but many of these systems will not ultimately run the free operating system, Gartner says. In fact, this high%age of Linux sales is being driven by the availability of cheap pirated copies of Windows rather than a desire to run Linux. The cost of Windows in the Asia-Pacific region, for example, has increased from 6% of the total price of a professional desktop PC in 1996 to 15% in 2004.
Linux will ship on 5% of the 185 mln PCs that are expected to be sold this year, but it will be particularly popular in the Asia/Pacific, Eastern Europe and Latin American regions, Gartner predicted. The open source operating system will be included with 9.8% of PCs shipped in Asia/Pacific, 11.2% in Eastern Europe, and 12.1% in Latin America. In the U.S., Linux will ship on 0.8% of PCs this year, the research firm predicted.
Phishing has cost U.S. consumers $500 mln, Ponemon Institute and Truste say. Truste arrived at the $500 mln figure by applying the survey’s $115 average loss per victim to the general Internet population. Gartner earlier calculated that a whopping $2.4 bln was lost to phishing fraud in a 12 month-period. At least 70% of respondents to the survey said they had visited a spoofed Web site. About 15% of those people said they had parted with private data such as credit card numbers, checking account information and social security numbers. A little more than 2% of all the people surveyed said they had lost money, in most cases within two weeks of being phished.
Comcast, the largest U.S. high-speed Internet provider, forecast earlier this year that it would add about 1.5 mln to 1.6 mln net new high-speed Internet subscribers in 2004, down from about 1.67 mln in 2003. Comcast has about 6 mln high-speed Internet customers.
US personal incomes rose 1.5% in Q2 2004, the fastest pace of growth in more than three years. All 50 U.S. states reported increases in personal income, and real earnings for all eight US regions climbed above the level set in Q1 2001, the previous peak in the national business cycle, the government reported. The Rocky Mountain and Far West regions posted the strongest personal income growth. Washington led the nation with a 2.4% increase in personal income, followed by Montana and Nevada, up 1.9% from the previous quarter.
Nielsen notes that for the first time in television viewing research the number of channels received on average by US households has dropped. In 2003 an average US household would be capable of receiving 102.1 TV channels, and in 2004 the average fell to 100.4 channels. The researcher is investigating the possible causes for the slide, and notes that the number of the viewed channels remains fairly constant.
Average Number Of TV Channels Receivable 1985 18.8 1990 33.2 1995 41.1 2000 74.6 2001 89.2 2002 102.1 2003 100.4
US mobile-gaming revenues are projected to more than double from $91.3 million in 2003 to $203.8 million in 2004, according to In-Stat/MDR.
Handelsbanken Capital Markets predicted the worldwide chip sales figures for August 2004 would be $18 bln. The total would be flat with the equivalent three-month average for July, but up 32.7% compared with the same figure in August 2003. That growth, seemingly robust, nevertheless represents a softening of market growth as it compares with July 2004 year-on-year growth of 37.9%, as calculated by the Semiconductor Industry Association in September.
With actual worldwide chip sales recorded by the SIA as $20.7 bln in June and $16.46 bln in July, Handelsbanken’s prediction implies actual worldwide chip sales in August of $16.84 bln, a 2.3% sequential rise and a 23.6% increase from the actual sales of $13.62 bln, recorded by the SIA for August 2003. Handelsbanken was sticking to its recently updated predictions for world chip sales of 25% annual growth in 2004 and 7% annual growth in 2005.
According to DoubleClick Research, heavy Internet users, defined as those who go online 19 days or more in a month, have a disproportionate impact on site statistics: 38.8% of viewers account for 73.0% of all page views.