Monday, January 31, 2011

The fastest growing communications innovations: What is next?


The technology adoption of some new communications innovations have increased exponentially in recent years.  The following graph shows that while it took around 75 years to the fixed line to reach 50 million customers, it took only 12 years to the mobile phone, 5 years to the iPod,  4 years to the e-mail and only 3 years to the Skype’s VoIP software.  It can be explained by the fact that several communications networks are already in place and new innovations can leverage existing infrastructure.  Another reason is the fact that communications consumers are more “technology educated” than before.  The fastest growing tech firm at the convergence of social networks, and mobile commerce is Groupon, which has reached 2 billion in revenue in two years of existence and the key mark of 50 million subscribers.


Source: debitel

A recent report by In-Stat indicates that smartphones are becoming the "standard" in mobile devices. Particularly the demand for advanced mobile handsets that contain significant processing power, robust memory, large screens and open operating systems will drive the sales of mobile manufacturers. 

Their forecast is that unit shipments of smartphones will be nearly 850 million by 2015. Among the critical factors for the smartphone success, there are powerful browsers, a wide variety of apps, easy to navigate user interface, and a good keyboard or touchscreen. Furthermore, other intangible attributes, such as being "fashion object" and that "your friends or relatives have one" are also important. 

In-Stat also predicts that the majority of U.S. handset shipments will be smartphones by 2012 while Android would maintain its momentum and will continue to be the leading OS.  In-Stat suggests that by 2015, over two-thirds of smartphones will still be WCDMA-based, with LTE smartphones representing only a small minority of annual handset shipments, even in four years.


What other communications devices will reach the fastest 50 million users?
Tablets represent a challenger with the penetration in the business sector. According to Gartner, nearly 20 million tablets have been sold in 2010, and around 54.8 million will be in 2011 and it should reach 208 million in 2014. In addition to Apple iPads, tablets include those based on Android, RIM, WebOS and other such operating systems. It appears that Apple iPads and other tablets are cannibalizing e-readers, gaming devices, and mini-notebooks.

 “Mini notebooks will suffer from the strongest cannibalization threat as media tablet average selling prices drop below $300 over the next 2 years,” says Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner. Gartner suggests that the North American market will account for 61% of the total market this year but that the percentage will fall to 43% in 2014 as tablets become more widely available across the world. More than half of tablets sold in 2010 supported WiFi.
It appears that Android tablets are gaining interesting market shares over iPad in the last quarter.  They gained 22% of the Q4-2010 market.  The iPad had 95% and decreased to 75%.   Galaxy, Samsung’s tablet with Android is the main contender for the iPad. Strategy Analytics forecast that Apple’s iPad will decrease below 50% market share in the next 2 years. 

Growth opportunities
·         Firms which should heavily benefits from the growth of tablets are:
o   online publishers (the ones who will bet on e-Books growth and sell directly to the public: i.e. Amazon)
o   devices manufacturers (Apple, Samsung, RIM)

o   technology suppliers (Tech SMEs, Publishing Technology plc [PTO.L])

Google just bought eBook Technologies 3 weeks ago.  It provides an end-to-end electronic book platform offering a full range of eBook products and services. It includes electronic reading devices, an online bookstore where readers can buy eBooks, an online "bookshelf" that lets users store their purchased content, and software that converts content to the company's eBook format.
·         Some experts suggest that new entrants in the tablet market should appear such as Amazon. If it is the case, Amazon would enjoy growth again as an online publisher and manufacturer, which it is already doing with the Kindle.
Louis Rhéaume
Infocom Intelligence
louis@infocomintelligence.com

2010 State of the Internet by Mashable

Here is in a big picture, the state of the Internet for 2010 by Mashable.

Louis Rhéaume
Infocom Intelligence
louis@infocomintelligence.com

Sunday, January 23, 2011

The 20 most popular US Venture Capitalist blogs

According to Compete, here are the 20 most popular US Venture Capitalist blogs:


  1. Paul Graham (@paulg), YCombinator, Essays (97,227)
  2. Fred Wilson (@fredwilson), Union Square Ventures, A VC (81,483)
  3. Mark Suster (@msuster), GRP Partners, Both Sides of the Table (53,655)
  4. Brad Feld (@bradfeld), Foundry Group, Feld Thoughts (38,821)
  5. Chris Dixon (@cdixon), Founder Collective, cdixon.org (20,988)
  6. David Skok (@bostonvc), Matrix Partners, For Entrepreneurs (14,173)
  7. Charlie O’Donnell (@ceonyc), First Round Capital, This is Going to be Big (13,970)
  8. Larry Cheng (@larryvc), Volition Capital, Thinking About Thinking (13,215)
  9. Dave McClure (@davemcclure), Founders Fund, Master of 500 Hats (11,127)
  10. Ben Horowitz (@bhorowitz), Andreesen Horowitz, Ben’s Blog (10,686)
  11. Jeremy Liew (@jeremysliew), Lightspeed Ventures Partners, LSVP (9,344)
  12. Bijan Sabet (@bijan), Spark Capital, Bijan Sabet (8,256)
  13. Ryan Spoon (@ryanspoon), Polaris Venture Partners, ryanspoon.com (7,828)
  14. Albert Wenger (@albertwenger), Union Square Ventures, Continuations (7,469)
  15. Roger Ehrenberg (@infoarbitrage), IA Ventures, Information Arbitrage (7,182)
  16. Rob Go (@robgo), NextView Ventures, robgo.org (6,934)
  17. Josh Kopelman (@joshk), First Round Capital, Redeye VC (6,778)
  18. David Cowan (@davidcowan), Bessemer Venture Partners, Who Has Time For This?(5,993)
  19. Mendelson/Feld (@foundrygroup), Foundry Group, Ask The VC (5,963)
  20. Bill Gurley (@bgurley), Benchmark Capital, Above The Crowd (5,428)
Louis Rhéaume
Infocom Intelligence
louis@infocomintelligence.com

The universe of Twitter apps

Here is a graph from Readwriteweb categorizing 150 Twitter applications :


Louis Rhéaume
Infocom Intelligence
louis@infocomintelligence.com

The most popular Apple apps

Friday, January 14, 2011

Does Groupon is worth 15 billion in an 2011 Initial public Offering (IPO)?

There is recent rumour on the Internet that Groupon will try an Initial Public Offering (IPO), which will value the firm around US$ 15 billion in the Spring of 2011.   It is true that Groupon is the fastest Internet firm to reach 1 billion in revenue in 2 years.  Gross and net margin are very high.  Groupon and number 2 LivingSocial have around 92% of web traffic in the group-buying discount market.   Groupon rejected a $6 billion offer from Google last year.

However, there are more than 500 imitators with the same business model targeting national, regional and international markets.  Most of them have even the same web site design as Groupon.  It is very easy to copy the recipe of success of Groupon.  The leader has already the first mover advantages: it became on important players in many cities to create a critical mass.  They have hundreds of salesperson to get new daily discounted group-buying deals.  They enjoy also temporary winning conditions.  For instance, when web advertising started to be implemented with high speed Internet, banner ads and video ads were very lucrative. Now with the proliferation of Internet advertising, these online ads are not so lucrative per click.  When it is new, it is more appealing  for a large segment of consumers.  Another example, is the success of virtual goods sold in online video game.  Who wants to buy a virtual good? I don't understand why am human being would do this, but 6% of the customers of online game did that for $640 million in 2010.  I'm not sure this is a sustainable trend, but it is new and appealing for a segment of the population, so far...

Groupon can create value by personnalizing its offering by getting to know better their customers and using socila networks with mobile networks.  Once you pre-authorize certain categories of ads you are more willing to receive such ads and with location-based services.

Facebook, Google and others can easily get a larger piece of the group-buying daily deals pie.

Does Groupon is worth 15 billion in an 2011 Initial public Offering (IPO)? There is already an Internet bubble and if the firm doesn't diversify its product offering and the way to do it, it may face severe competition.

Louis Rhéaume
Infocom Intelligence
louis@infocomintelligence.com

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Some key Internet statistics of 2010

The number of emails sent on the internet in 2010 (if we delete spam) was around 11.7 trillion.
294 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
1.88 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
480 million – New email users since the year before.
262 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 89 percent are spam).
2.9 billion – The number of email accounts worldwide.
25 percent – Share of email accounts that are corporate.
Websites
255 million – The number of websites as of December 2010.
21.4 million – Added websites in 2010.
Domain names
88.8 million – .COM domain names at the end of 2010.
13.2 million – .NET domain names at the end of 2010.
8.6 million – .ORG domain names at the end of 2010.
79.2 million – The number of country code top-level domains (e.g. .CN, .UK, .DE, etc.).
202 million – The number of domain names across all top-level domains (October 2010).
7 percent – The increase in domain names since the year before.
Internet users
1.97 billion – Internet users worldwide (June 2010).
14 percent – Increase in internet users since the previous year.
825.1 million – internet users in Asia.
475.1 million – internet users in Europe.
266.2 million – internet users in North America.
204.7 million – internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
110.9 million – internet users in Africa.
63.2 million –internet users in the Middle East.
21.3 million – internet users in Oceania / Australia.
Social media
152 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
25 billion – Number of sent tweets on Twitter in 2010
100 million – New accounts added on Twitter in 2010
175 million – People on Twitter as of September 2010
7.7 million – People following @ladygaga (Lady Gaga, Twitter’s most followed user).
600 million – People on Facebook at the end of 2010.
250 million – New people on Facebook in 2010.
30 billion – Pieces of content (links, notes, photos, etc.) shared on Facebook per month.
70 percent – Share of Facebook’s user base located outside the United States.
20 million – The number of Facebook apps installed each day.
Videos
2 billion – The number of videos watched per day on YouTube.
35 – Hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.
186 – The number of online videos the average internet user watches in a month (USA).
84 percent – Share of internet users who view videos online (USA).
14 percent – Share of internet users who have uploaded videos online (USA).
2+ billion – The number of videos watched per month on Facebook.
20 million – Videos uploaded to Facebook per month.
Images
5 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (September 2010).
3000+ – Photos uploaded per minute to Flickr.
130 million – At the above rate, the number of photos uploaded per month to Flickr.
3+ billion – Photos uploaded per month to Facebook.
36 billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year.
Source: VentureBeat
Louis Rhéaume
Infocom Intelligence
louis@infocomintelligence.com

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Create your own Twitter or Facebook daily newspaper



How to read Twitter and Facebook as a daily newspaper

paper.li wants you to organize links shared on Twitter and Facebook into an easy to read newspaper-style format.  It aims to offer a great way to discover content that matters to you - even if you are not connected 24/7.  You can also consult the "personnalized" newspaper of others users.

Aggregating content is not new.  Yahoo through its syndication model does that since its creation by buying information from different news sources and personnalizing the content through My Yahoo where the users select some categories of their choices. However, paper.li is one of the first to offer aggregation of Twitter information and Facebook information.

The quality here resides in the credibility of the person creating the daily newspapers.  Thus, indexing the most  relevant sources on a particular topic can create value to the reader.  For instance, a travel executive can create a personnalized daily newspaper where the content would bring value to its customers.  So far the categories are:


Categories



SmallRivers (paper.li) is a privately held startup incorporated in Switzerland (Lausanne) and located on the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology EPFL campus.

Co-founded by Edouard Lambelet and Iskander Pols, the company is focused on facilitating the discovery of relevant content and other people of interest on the web. Paper.li is their latest development, and by far the most promising. Since inception, in less than 6 months, the company got 2 million users.

There is a new word for this type of aggregating tool: it is call "curation".  It is a methodology emerging that companies can use to help gather and sort the information that matters for them. In today world of information overload, corporate CIO's and CMO's are exploring ways to build internal curation solutions.

For more information on that topic you can consult
http://www.businessinsider.com/paper-li-2011-1

Louis Rhéaume
Infocom Intelligence
louis@infocomintelligence.com