U.S. IT Spending To Fall 3.1% This Year, Forrester Says.

"Forrester Research says it now sees 2009 U.S. IT spending down 3.1%, rather than the 1.6% growth the firm had previously projected. Forrester notes that 'the U.S. recession keeps getting worse than we and many economists had expected.'

Forrester notes that in February 2008, it had been forecasting 10% growth in IT spending this year. Oops."

Twitter Finds Now It Has The Leverage On Mobile Operators.

"But as the [Twitter] service has gone mainstream, suddenly it behooves Vodafone to strike a deal with Twitter, make the [SMS] costs workable, and be able to offer the service to its customers. The mobile industry has long engaged in these stupid battles over who 'owns' the customer. Typically, the operator's take has been that they own the pipe, so they own the customer. But maybe they're finally figuring out that without any compelling services to travel through it, the pipe's not such a big deal."

Follow the Mobile User.

Vic Gundotra, Vice President of Engineering for Google’s mobile and developer products, writes: "But as a community of operators, device manufacturers and software providers, we continue to get in their way. In short, and as a general rule, we make it too costly, too unfamiliar, and too difficult to do anything beyond voice calls. In reply I offer up three suggestions: simpler data plans, better web browsers, and a smoother on-device experience."

Dell to Get Into the Carrier Game?

"A Japanese newspaper reported that Dell plans to resell mobile data airtime from NTTDoCoMo along with its notebooks, according to TechRadar. The idea of a PC maker as an MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) may be more appealing to device makers than the current practice of carriers subsidizing portable PCs, because it gives the PC makers a piece of the wireless service revenue pie."

Time Is More Valuable Than Money.

Bruce Temkin writes: "I surveyed more than 4,500 US consumers about how they select the companies that they do business with. It turns out that customer service was considered more important than price across all 12 industries that I examined. The research will likely get published in April.

This is all good news for marketers; since it lessens the need to emphasize price. Also, it reinforces just how important customer experience is within any companies’ value proposition.

The bottom line: If you value customers’ time, they’ll find you more valuable."

Sprint to deploy WiMax in 10 U.S. cities in 2009.

"By rolling out its WiMax services in major cities, Sprint is hoping to stay ahead of the curve of rival carriers AT&T and Verizon, which each plan to launch their own 4G mobile data services based on Long Term Evolution (LTE) in roughly two years' time. LTE is a modulation technique that is the latest variation of Global Systems for Mobile Communications (GSM) technology and is seen as the natural progression of High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA), the GSM technology that is currently used by carriers such as AT&T to deliver 3G mobile data services. "

Skype handles more international calls than AT&T.

"Reasearch company TeleGeography estimates that Skype's international traffic jumped by 41 percent in 2008 and topped 33 billion minutes of use, most of that in free calls. Traditional international calls grew only 12 percent in 2008."

T-Mobile’s My Account app hits Android Market.

"According to Android and Me, T-Mo’s free My Account app provides 'current activity, bill summary, plan information, online payment, help guides, forums, battery info, storage info, and more.'

While there’s nothing terribly groundbreaking here, it is nice to see a mobile carrier develop a native application for its own (current) flagship device instead of leaving it up to third party developers."

InnoPath Adds LTE Support to Leading ActiveCare Mobile Device Management Platform.

"InnoPath’s leading ActiveCare server simultaneously supports CDMA, GSM, WiMAX and now LTE, effectively tying the circuit/SMS world with IP. This support leverages the extensibility of the platform as well as the company’s deep understanding of OMA-DM standards evolution and the deployment plans of its Tier-1 customers."

iPhone Makes Up 50 Percent of Smartphone Web Traffic In U.S., Android Already 5 Percent.

"The iPhone now accounts for 50 percent of mobile Web traffic from smartphones in the U.S., according to an AdMob Mobile Metrics report released this morning. Over the past six months, the iPhone has taken share from Blackberry and Windows Mobile. In August 2008, the iPhone made up only 10 percent of mobile Web traffic from smartphones. During the same time, Blackberry’s share has gone from 32 percent to 21 percent (with the Curve and the Pearl coming in stronger than the Storm), while Windows Mobile has taken an even bigger hit, declining from 30 percent to 13 percent. Palm is also down to 7 percent from 19 percent six months ago."

Sybase launches iAnywhere Mobile Office.

"Sybase has announced a new version of its iAnywhere Mobile Office, an enterprise-centric solution offering email, calendar, tasks, and contacts, as well as corporate directory lookup. In addition to the availability of native clients for Microsoft's Windows Mobile and Nokia's S60 platform, the new version will also be available on the iPhone. The iPhone client can be downloaded directly from Apple's App Store."

Mobile: The holy grail at security conference.

"In his presentation on security in Google's Android mobile platform, University of Michigan graduate student Jon Oberheide said the code in mobile software is newer than that found on the desktop and less robust against attacks. Attackers aren't really targeting it yet because mobile phones aren't seen as being much use for sending spam and launching denial of service attacks, however they are good for attacks targeted at individuals, he said."

New iPhone Software Has Something for Businesses.

"But the new iPhone software still lacks capabilities that enterprises need. 'One thing I haven't seen is on the management side. We haven't heard of a strategy for how to manage these devices,' Krishnapillai said.

A potentially even more important omission is the lack of background processing, said Ken Dulaney, analyst with Gartner. 'It desperately needed background processing,' he said. 'You can't do security effectively without it.' That's because for a security program to be effective, it needs to run independently of the applications being audited, he said. But since the phone can't run processes in the background, it can't run security separately from the applications, he said.

Management tools also can't work effectively without background processing, he said. While management tools can use the push notification, that still requires the recipient to take some action. With background processing, the iPhone could have a service like Microsoft's Windows Update to automatically update devices, he said."

Recession And Innovation From Wool To Hulu.

Bruce Temkin writes: "Lindstrom describes two concepts: 1) don’t ask consumers what they want; figure out what they need; and 2) practical features give consumers a reason to make a purchase.

The bottom line: It’s time to ask yourself if you’re keeping up with shifting customer needs."

Apple Opens Up More Ways To Get Paid On The iPhone, Adds Key New Features. Apps Hit 800 Million Downloads.

"The new OS, iPhone 3.0, will support 1,000 APIs. Apple seems to be giving a lot of extra love to paid apps, which will gain the ability to sell additional levels, subscriptions, virtual goods, or extra content from right within the app...

Apple is not opening up background processing, which would allow more than one app to be running at once—a feature already common on Android and other phones. Apple says it takes up too much battery life.

Apple is also opening up push notification APIs for developers. This will allow apps to incorporate email, IM, and other messaging services."

70% of mobile users don't download apps.

"Skype claims that the results of the survey clearly show that most of the respondents 'expressed a strong desire to be able to choose mobile applications for themselves' and that they were prepared to 'pay more for a device that will allow them to control the applications.'

Other highlights of the findings include:
- 62% do not yet view their mobile device as an extension of their computer.
- Only 23% feel that they have more or the same level of control over their mobile device as they have over their computer.
- 67% want to be able to choose their mobile applications for themselves, rather than have their carriers choose for them. "

Mobility Management and the iPhone.

Philippe Winthrop writes: "I guess the point I am trying to make is that Enterprise Mobility Management, as important as it is, need not be rocket science. It can be managed so easily that consumers (employees) can do it (with coaching). However, many MDM companies still think of the management being done only centrally. Perhaps there is a model that can allow self-service MDM and MAM (mobile application management)..."

At SXSW Smartphones Rule, Notebooks Drool.

Stacey Higginbotham writes: "The folks attending this show are generally ahead of the computing trends in the general population, so while I don’t foresee folks dumping their notebooks in favor of smartphones, I do think people are more comfortable with letting their smartphone be their computer for a longer amount of time. The willingness of these attendees to rely mainly on their phones on the floor of the conference is a shift from years before. I bet it’s a shift that continues as mobile phones get smarter and mobile broadband gets better."

Smartphone Headache: Managing the expense of supporting the smartphone.

An interview with David Ginsburg of InnoPath Software is available now in the March 2009 issue of Mobile Business Magazine. An online version can be found here: http://viewer.zmags.co.uk/showmag.php?mid=wpsshs#/page48/

More Info On Customer Experience And Loyalty.

Bruce Tempkin writes: "In an earlier post, I discussed my research on how customer experience correlates to loyalty. That analysis looked at the link between good experiences and three elements of loyalty: Willingness to buy from the provider, reluctance to switch away from the provider, and likelihood to recommend the provider... The bottom line: It’s another wake-up call for wireless providers, TV service providers, ISPs, and banks."

Customer Service in a Shrinking Economy.

"If anything, the tough economy has made starker the difference between companies that put customers first and those that sacrifice loyalty for short-term gain. In this year's ranking, based on data from J.D. Power & Associates, which, like BusinessWeek, is owned by The McGraw-Hill Companies (MHP), more than half of the top 25 brands showed improved customer service scores over last year. Among the bottom 25 of the more than 200 brands surveyed, scores mostly fell."

GrandCentral To (Finally) Launch As Google Voice. It’s Very, Very Good.

"But they can prove that the service is reliable. No dropped calls. No outages. Proper support even though its a free product. If they do that they can conceivably control the phone numbers for millions of people…and eventually find a way to monetize all that power."

Beceem Integrating Red Bend vDirect Mobile into WiMAX Chipsets.

"Beceem Communications is using Red Bend Software’s vDirect Mobile device management client software for their WiMAX chipsets. The integration of the technology from Beceem and Red Bend will result in Beceem customers having the option of tapping into Red Bend’s OMA-DM client."

Mobile Device Management Now a Top Priority for Vendors.

"Just this week, systems management vendor CA released its first iteration of a mobile device management solution, called simply CA Mobile Device Management (MDM). In its current state, CA’s solution supports just BlackBerry, but in the near future, support for Symbian and Windows Mobile operating systems will be added...

Recent research from IDC estimated that the mobile device management market is poised to grow from $205.7 million in 2006 to $345 million by 2011...

The overall goal of CA’s MDM is to take a good chunk of the management onus away from administrators and pass it on to the users themselves with the self-service portal, where users can activate devices. Administrators still retain a level of control over exactly what features and functions users can tinker with — like data wiping, locking and unlocking devices, and resetting passwords...

Ptak said that while jumping on the device management bandwagon is good for big vendors like CA, Microsoft and HP, it may not bode well for smaller vendors. The fact that the major players are jockeying for mobile device management shows that devices are being recognized, however, and that is a trend Ptak believes will continue.

'They’d be really foolish not to support device management,' he said. 'You need robust mobile device management to go along with network and systems management.'"

OTA configuration for Android.

"WDSGlobal [has] just contributed a new project into the Open Handset Alliance’s Android Project... WDSGlobal’s project simply extends the OMA CP standard onto the Android platform."

iPhone developer adds “phone home” capability to stop app piracy.

"Ben [Chatelain] began thinking and decided to create a server callback system that would alert him when someone was running a cracked version of his application. The callback gave Ben information which included the UDID (Unique Device Identifier) of the iPhone. From there the server could then determine if the app was paid for or pirated. For those that were determined as pirated, the server would then allow the app to run as a demo and present the user with a message after 10 uses."

Mobile Device Management, Now More than Ever.

Carl Weinschenk writes: "It doesn’t take a world-class debater to convince folks that mobile device management is growing in importance. Mobile devices are becoming more powerful, the tasks they are used for increasingly are mission-critical and the data stored on them more valuable."

Nokia affirms LTE commitment, dismisses WiMAX.

"James Harper, Nokia's senior manager of technology marketing... dismissed WiMAX as a 4G standard, calling it a 'niche play,' and saying that the technology's lack of backwards compatibility and a clear roadmap were major drawbacks."

LG recalls 30,000 handsets because they suck at calling 911.

"...a bug managed to sneak its way into the LG Spyder, which has lead to a recall of the device. If the handset is unable to determine the GPS position during the 911 call, the call will be dropped. Spyder owners are being advised to pop by their carrier for an update - so if you’ve got one, get to upgrading."

InnoPath: Mobile Device Management (video from MWC).

Video is here.

State of WiMAX: Will Huawei Win It All?

"WiMAX, despite losing attention and mindshare in the U.S., seems to be thriving across the planet. Business Standard, an Indian newspaper, reports that Huawei, Telsima and Alvarion are three of the companies shortlisted for the $1 billion WiMAX network being built by BSNL, the state-owned Indian telecom company. With Nortel and Alcatel-Lucent (a ALU) having retreated from the WiMAX market, one wonders: Who is going to win the WiMAX equipment sweepstakes?"

UK cell providers ask Nokia to pull Skype from phones.

"TechSpot reports that UK operators Orange and O2 are reportedly threatening Nokia over the decision to include a Skype client on their N97 handset."

Red Bend news briefs (Intel/WiMAX, Borqs/Android).

"Red Bend Software... has announced that Intel Corporation has licensed its vDirect Mobile device management client for use in the Intel embedded WiMAX chipset based on Intel Centrino 2 Processor Technology. The first Red Bend-enabled Intel chipsets began shipping in fall 2008 with the 'back-to-school' release of Intel-based notebook PCs, which will reach consumers in the US and Japan from operators Clearwire and UQ, respectively.

Separately, Red Bend has revealed that its MSM solution will be deployed this year in Android smartphones sold to mobile consumers in China and international markets. Software platform provider Borqs International Holding has adopted Red Bend’s vCurrent Mobile firmware over-the-air updating software and vDirect Mobile device management software for its Open Mobile System (OMS) platform based on Google Android. Borqs is on track to launch multiple Android-based handsets with its OEM partners for China and other markets in the first half of 2009."