Week of May 14, 2007

How Powerful Are Blogs?

Friday, May 18, 2007

Yesterday, a single influential tech blog (Engadget) posted a story stating that the Apple iPhone release was going to be delayed until October and the new Mac OS update would be delayed until 2008. The information was published based on an internal company memo mailed to Engadget from Apple mail servers. It turns out that the information was bogus, and the information was pulled offline 20 minutes later.

But what was the impact of this single post online for 20 minutes? Apple lost a staggering $4 billion in market capitalization on the news, with its stock price immediately plunging. The stock eventually largely recovered by the end of the day, but a lot of people lost a lot of money during that 20 minutes... all due to one blog entry.

Apple iPhone Gets FCC Approval

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Word came down today that the Apple iPhone has received FCC approval as a telephone handset. The device is now cleared for sale in the United States. Despite mistaken press yesterday on the Engadget website, the iPhone release has not been delayed but will still hit the shelves in June. As we mentioned in an earlier Trends, unofficial presales have been extremely strong.

The New College World

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

A great quote from Nick Carr's blog (www.roughtype.com) outlines the new world of college today:

"To generalize: Facebook is the dorm; Wikipedia is the library; and Craigslist is the mall. One's for socializing; one's for studying; one's for trading."

Cell phone-only households growing fast

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

A federal study, released on May 14th, shows the phenomenal growth in cell phone-only households. It's estimated that 12% of all US adults now have just a cell phone. In some demos, the numbers are much higher. 25% of 18-24's have only a cell phone and an even higher percentage of 25-29's use only a cell phone; 29% of those in their upper 20's are without a landline. Males (13%) are more likely than females (11%) to go mobile-only.

So these people are younger and more male. Sound familiar? These are the demos that Arbitron has the most trouble reaching. This has huge implications for all forms of consumer research, which includes Arbitron. Not only are people less likely to want to participate in surveys, they're also less reachable, especially in the younger demos.

Comcast, 911, and how the Internet isn't always an improvement

Monday, May 14, 2007

We've seen for years now the efforts of telephone companies to make inroads at cable television and cable companies to do the same with telephone service. Most of the battle is currently being waged via the Internet, with a sore spot for telephone companies being VoIP services, which are telephones that work over the Internet. Vonage is perhaps the highest profile company in this space, but the cable companies are there, too.

Now word has come down via the It Can Happen To You blog that a problem that was presumably solved for VoIP has cropped up again: 911 service. The story of a man unsuccessfully trying to call 911 via his Comcast 911 phone while his son is having a seizure has been all over the Internet. Comcast has yet to make a statement, but when lives are at stake and your service fails, you can expect the bad press they are getting.

The story is important in the broader sense because it illustrates that just because a service can be duplicated on the Internet, it doesn't mean it is the same. And until the consumer is confident that it is the same, there will be adoption problems. The Internet is not always an improvement.