difference
There Is No Difference in Usage Between Unlimited Data Plans and Tiered Data Plans [Data]
Hey Carriers. We need to talk. You know how you said you were going to start throttling high data usage users in hopes to preserve bandwidth? That’s bullshit, apparently. It’s only because you want to get us onto tiered data plans so you can charge us overages. With hate, everyone.
Seriously. Validas, an analytics firm, analyzed 50,000 cellphone bills from AT&T and Verizon to see if throttling was a necessary evil to conserve bandwidth. However, the numbers point to no. Instead, Validas guesstimates that it’s because carriers would rather have us on tiered data plans for the overage fees. According to Validas:
“When we look at the top 5% of data users, there is virtually no difference in data consumption between those on unlimited and those on tiered plans — and yet the unlimited consumers are the ones at risk of getting their service turned off. So it’s curious that anyone would think the throttling here represents a serious effort at alleviating network bandwidth issues. After all, Sprint does seemingly fine maintaining non-throttled unlimited data for its customers.”
The point being, throttling the Top 5% of unlimited data users seems to be unnecessary because the Top 5% are using the same amount of data on their tiered plans anyway. Go figure, carriers trying to squeeze a dime out of a nickel. [BGR]
How Apple’s Business Completely Changed
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-apples-business-completely-changed-2012-1
What a difference a few years makes. Four years ago, Apple analysts fretted over iPod shipments and computer sales when an earnings call rolled around. All the early chatter is now focused on whether surging iPhone and iPad sales will even be enough to meet soaring expectations.
The iPad, only a rumor two years ago, accounted for 24% of revenue last quarter. The iPhone, meanwhile, has jumped from 10% of revenue at the beginning of 2008 to 39% last quarter–and nearly 50% at the beginning of last year. With the tablet market still in its infancy and huge opportunities still available in mobile, the shift in Apple’s revenues has only just begun. All of which should futher underline the changing nature of their business: Apple is essentially a mobile computing company.
Which is not to say the rest of the company isn’t growing. Mac shipments were up 20.7% year-over-year in the fourth quarter, according to Gartner–even as the rest of the PC market fell 5.9%. It’s just that they have not kept up with the astronomic growth of the company’s mobile products.
See our preview of Apple’s earnings here→
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See Also:
- THE NEW NORMAL: The Changing Tech IPO Market
- EBAY’S TRANSFORMATION: When Do We Start Calling eBay A Payments Company?
- BING: Microsoft’s Still Throwing Billions Of Dollars A Year Into This Online Money Pit
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How Apple’s Business Completely Changed
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-apples-business-completely-changed-2012-1
What a difference a few years makes. Four years ago, Apple analysts fretted over iPod shipments and computer sales when an earnings call rolled around. All the early chatter is now focused on whether surging iPhone and iPad sales will even be enough to meet soaring expectations.
The iPad, only a rumor two years ago, accounted for 24% of revenue last quarter. The iPhone, meanwhile, has jumped from 10% of revenue at the beginning of 2008 to 39% last quarter–and nearly 50% at the beginning of last year. With the tablet market still in its infancy and huge opportunities still available in mobile, the shift in Apple’s revenues has only just begun. All of which should futher underline the changing nature of their business: Apple is essentially a mobile computing company.
Which is not to say the rest of the company isn’t growing. Mac shipments were up 20.7% year-over-year in the fourth quarter, according to Gartner–even as the rest of the PC market fell 5.9%. It’s just that they have not kept up with the astronomic growth of the company’s mobile products.
See our preview of Apple’s earnings here→
Please follow BI Intelligence on Twitter.
Join the conversation about this story »
See Also:
- THE NEW NORMAL: The Changing Tech IPO Market
- EBAY’S TRANSFORMATION: When Do We Start Calling eBay A Payments Company?
- BING: Microsoft’s Still Throwing Billions Of Dollars A Year Into This Online Money Pit
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SOPA and PIPA Have Been Pulled (For Now) [Sopa]
Source: http://lifehacker.com/5877993/sopa-and-pipa-have-been-pulled-for-now
After Wednesday’s all-day protest of SOPA and PIPA, the bills that want to censor your internet, both bills have been shelved for further consideration, and will not be voted on as scheduled. Rep. Lamar Smith, the sponsor of SOPA, said he’s still committed to fighting piracy, but that this legislation isn’t the way to do it:
I have heard from the critics and I take seriously their concerns regarding proposed legislation to address the problem of online piracy. It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products.
The Committee will continue work with copyright owners, Internet companies, financial institutions to develop proposals that combat online piracy and protect America’s intellectual property. We welcome input from all organizations and individuals who have an honest difference of opinion about how best to address this widespread problem. The Committee remains committed to finding a solution to the problem of online piracy that protects American intellectual property and innovation.
We’re hesitant to say the bill is “dead”, but after the events of this week it’s unlikely we’ll see SOPA and PIPA come to a vote in their current form. This probably isn’t the last we’ve seen of anti-piracy legislation, of course, and future bills could be just as dangerous. There are still things you can do to help, and while this is a victory, it isn’t a permanent one, so we wouldn’t get too comfortable just yet. Hit the link to read more.
Photo by Aspect3D (Shutterstock).
Statement from Chairman Smith on Senate Delay of Vote on PROTECT IP Act | US House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary via Ars Technica
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You Probably Can’t Tell the Difference Between This and a Theater Projector [Video]
Sony’s 4K projector was first announced last year, but they have the thing on display at CES this year. After getting to zone out in a pitch black room where the projector blasted the new Spider Man trailer at full resolution on a 182-inch screen, I’m sold on the idea.
What makes 4K exciting for the home is that it provides a sharp image for large display sizes. 1080p video is great on a 60-inch TV, but it’s not quite as amazing when you try to project a 100-inch image on a wall. But 4K is made for screens exceeding 100 inches. So how did it look? While watching the trailer, I swore I had just paid $75 for a movie ticket and a small popcorn.
Colors were rich and bright. Nothing was washed out. Small details, like wrinkles on people’s faces or textures on a building were sharply defined. I go watch movies because I love the large screen experience. If I had one of these things, I probably wouldn’t go to the movies anymore.
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Most Valuable Pitchman
Source: http://blog.compete.com/2011/10/25/tom-brady-most-valuable-pitchman/
I had been eagerly awaiting the start of the Patriots season since their heartbreaking loss at the start of the year. The first Monday night game in September I got to see my favorite team back in action, along with my favorite player. What I wasn’t expecting was to see Tom Brady off the field as well, advertising footwear during one of the game’s commercial breaks.
I loved the commercial, and not just because it made walking around aimlessly look incredibly cool. It brought a new dimension to a brand that I remember seeing only on girls walking around campus in the winter. Forgetting their origin as Australian surfers’ footwear, Uggs are now so tied to their classic boot look for the female demographic that I can’t imagine them breaking into the male market significantly.
Well after a month of walking around Boston seeing Brady’s image posted on buildings (and I’ve heard they’re in other cities, as well) I wondered what kind of boost the brand is getting from the campaign.
While the trend looks the same, with the traffic starting to pick up for the holiday season, uggsaustralia.com has a whopping 237,887 more unique visitors than it did in September last year, a 48% increase. There has been an overall increase in traffic year over year, but that difference was only 23% in July before the ad campaign started.
Also, more people online seem to be going to the site. The trend has steadily been on the rise, with some significant peaks since the commercial started airing in September.
The most important question, though, is what kind of effect is Brady having on driving the male demographic to the site? There isn’t a major increase during September, but it’s up 2% year over year in the male demographic. The beauty of the campaign is it may be targeting females just as much to get the shoes for their guys as gifts during the upcoming holiday season.
After all this, it’s still hard to tell if the campaign is having a significant effect—the next few months will give us a better idea.
But I think I might get a pair. If Tom wears them they must be cool, right?
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Sony LCD 3DTV Gets Disappointing First Look
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5561454/sony-lcd-3dtv-gets-disappointing-first-look
Gary Merson at HD Guru has seen Sony’s new KDL-55HX800 LCD 3DTV live and in person. His first take? Even a slight tilt of the head makes you see double and lose the 3D effect. Uh oh.
Merson found a whole range of things to be troubled about in his time with the Sony: double-vision, color shift, relatively shallow depth. But the main issue—as Mark reported at this year’s CES—is that LCD and OLED screens just aren’t up to 3D. At least not in the way that plasma displays clearly are.
It’s also worth mentioning that the HX800 Merson viewed is actually the lowest end 3D model Sony offers, and in fact is technically a “3D-ready” set, meaning that it uses a separate sync transmitter instead of the integrated 3D functionality of the LX900 series. We won’t know how big, if any, a difference that makes until we’re able to compare the two side by side. But for now, the early returns suggest that plasma’s still the early king of 3D technology. [HD Guru]
Google’s New Indexing System Is Fully Caffeinated
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5559015/googles-new-indexing-system-is-fully-caffeinated
Google’s latest web indexing system, the tool that pre-scans the entire web to have a ready answer to your search query, promises “50 percent fresher results for web searches.” It’s called Caffeine. And it comes with staggering Google search stats.
The main difference with Caffeine is that, rather than search one entire group of sites (represented in that lead graphic as a layer), then another, less prioritized group of sites, then yet another less prioritized group of sites, everything with the Caffeine algorithm is pretty much indexed constantly. Teased for several months now, Caffeine is the sort of update Google needs to follow the pace of searching services like Twitter. And indeed, Google will need to maintain/continue such innovations to keep up—our world is translated from analog to digital in more, quicker ways every day.
So now for those wicked Google stats:
• Every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel.
• If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second
• Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database
• Caffeine adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day.
• You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information
• If these iPods were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.
[Google]
JetBlue All-You-Can-Jet Pass – how viral can be manufactured (easily)
http://bit.ly/13sF7E
Enjoy unlimited travel with our All-You-Can-Jet Pass! For just $599* you can take JetBlue anywhere you like, as often as you like, from September 8 to October 8, 2009. Use your All-You-Can-Jet Pass for business, for pleasure, to visit your favorite cities or to meet with a client. You might as well just do it all! With more than 50 cities to choose from, and for just $599, it’s a deal you can’t pass up.
About the Pass
- $599 for a month of unlimited travel, any available seat
- Domestic taxes and fees included
- International and Puerto Rico taxes and fees not included
- On sale through Friday, August 21, 2009, or while supplies last
- Travel Dates: Tuesday, September 8, 2009 through Thursday, October 8, 2009
- Each flight must be booked no later than 11:59 p.m. MDT three days prior to the flight’s scheduled departure.
- Nonrefundable/nontransferable/no name changes permitted
- Customers who already have a flight booked during the pass travel period can pay the difference to upgrade to the pass by calling 1-800-JETBLUE (538-2583), prompt 4.
- Each All-You-Can-Jet Pass is eligible for 35 TrueBlue points. Flights booked on the pass are not available for additional TrueBlue points.
To purchase an All-You-Can-Jet Pass:
Call 1-800-JETBLUE (538-2583), option 4. You do not have to be a TrueBlue member at the time of purchase, but a TrueBlue number is required to book all flights.To join TrueBlue, click here; it’s free.
To book flights with your All-You-Can-Jet Pass:
- Before calling to reserve your flight, please visit jetblue.com to check availability and select flight times.
- Call 1-800-JETBLUE (538-2583), prompt 4.
- Provide your pass number which is your original reservation number.
- Provide your TrueBlue number.
- You may only book one flight per city per day; if a violation of this policy is found, JetBlue will honor only the last booking made and cancel the customer’s other bookings from that city on that day.
- Each flight must be booked no later than 11:59 p.m. MDT three days prior to the flight’s scheduled departure.
- You can change/cancel flights for no fee with three (3) or more days notice; changes or cancellations to flight bookings made after 11:59 p.m. MDT three days prior to the flight’s scheduled departure will be charged standard JetBlue change/cancel fees.
To change or cancel All-You-Can-Jet Pass travel:
- Greater than three (3) days before a flight: $0 change/cancellation fees
- Less than three (3) days before a flight: JetBlue’s standard change/cancel fees apply
In the case of a no-show, the customer’s pass will be placed on hold, any reserved pass flights will be canceled, and no new flight segments wil be able to be booked until the customer pays a $100 no-show penalty.
*Other important restrictions apply. For complete details, please read the Full Terms and Conditions.
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Occasions and Holidays Drive Movie Box Office Sales, Not Advertising
Taking the top box office results for each of 52 weekends from the past 10 complete years (1998 – 2008; Source: IMDB.com) we see consistently that occasions like Valentines, Memorial Day, July 4th, and Thanksgiving show increased movie going activity. People have more time during these holidays to go to the movies and Valentines is a date+movie occasion. Also, during the summer, many people go to the movie theatre to escape the heat so there is an overall hump every year during the summer months — from Memorial Day to Labor Day.
People go out during Valentines, Memorial Day, July 4th, and Thanksgiving. And they still spend what they planned to spend — 2 tickets for movie — they didn’t buy 2 more tickets and see a second movie on the same date or holiday weekend. If they had several good movies to choose from (often, they don’t), they would choose to spend the finite dollars on the one movie they really wanted to see. The overall movie spending “pie” did not increase much, if any, year over year.
1998 $4,055,194,733 n/a
1999 $4,253,601,768 5%
2000 $4,496,554,005 6%
2001 $5,003,433,737 11%
2002 $5,489,974,199 10%
2003 $5,581,797,720 2%
2004 $ 5,697,299,530 2%
2005 $ 5,524,566,579 -3%
2006 $ 5,660,826,625 +2%
2007 $ 5,968,027,963 +5%
2008 $ 5,887,193,490 -1%
The chart below shows a red line which is the average of all 10 years. The 10 thin blue lines are the annual lines from1998 – 2008, inclusive and these are plotted as actual dollars. They come out right on top of each other.
Movie advertising, which runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars a year, has failed to noticeably increase the overall spending year-round or even during specific times. The chart below shows the differentials (difference between an annual line and the 10-yr average line). These all hover closely in the +$50M and -$50M band. The amplitude of the 10-yr average (red line) is larger than $50M in the summer hump — implying that the average change in movie ticket sales due to normal seasonality is larger than the change in amplitude caused by ALL movie advertising combined.
And the summer “hump” is due to actual demand (people going out to movie theatres, some to escape the heat) not due to advertising. The only effect of advertising is to share-shift from one movie to another — the total spending remains consistent and even seasonal variations are consistent — a “zero-sum game.”
All-Time USA Box office
Source: IMDB.com
| Rank | Title | USA Box Office |
| 1. | Titanic (1997) | $600,779,824 |
| 2. | The Dark Knight (2008) | $533,316,061 |
| 3. | Star Wars (1977) | $460,935,665 |
| 4. | Shrek 2 (2004) | $436,471,036 |
| 5. | E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) | $434,949,459 |
| 6. | Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace(1999) | $431,065,444 |
| 7. | Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006) | $423,032,628 |
| 8. | Spider-Man (2002) | $403,706,375 |
| 9. | Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005) | $380,262,555 |
| 10. | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King(2003) | $377,019,252 |
| 11. | Spider-Man 2 (2004) | $373,377,893 |
| 12. | The Passion of the Christ (2004) | $370,270,943 |
| 13. | Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) | $367,614,540 |
| 14. | Jurassic Park (1993) | $356,784,000 |
| 15. | The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) | $340,478,898 |
| 16. | Finding Nemo (2003) | $339,714,367 |
| 17. | Spider-Man 3 (2007) | $336,530,303 |
| 18. | Forrest Gump (1994) | $329,691,196 |
| 19. | The Lion King (1994) | $328,423,001 |
| 20. | Shrek the Third (2007) | $320,706,665 |
| 21. | Transformers (2007) | $318,759,914 |
| 22. | Iron Man (2008) | $318,298,180 |
| 23. | Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001) | $317,557,891 |
| 24. | Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull(2008) | $317,011,114 |
| 25. | The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring(2001) | $313,837,577 |
Digital Consigliere
Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.
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