Forty-four percent pay for non-text mobile data services, reinforcing current business models for mobile carriers

Adoption of non-text mobile data services has exceeded 40% of the more than 70 million U.S. broadband households with a mobile phone service, according to Parks Associates’ new consumer study Mobile Convergence: Platforms, Applications, and Services.

Over one-fourth of mobile service users have adopted mobile Internet and e-mail services, eclipsing other mobile data ARPU drivers like mobile TV and music, indicating that carriers will have to win subscribers through more “practical” services first. The fast adoption of mobile social networking and navigation services, which have both exceeded 10%, also indicates carriers can be successful in deploying popular Web activities as revenue-generating data services on the mobile platform.

“Non-text mobile data services are central to wireless carriers’ long-term plans for revenue growth,” said Harry Wang, Director of Health and Mobile Product Research, Parks Associates, “The strong growth in usage of mobile Internet, e-mail, social networking, and navigation during the past two years shows consumers are eager for mobile applications that offer convenience and rich features.”

Use of multipurpose devices like smartphones is another driver, Wang said. “Smartphone penetration will exceed 30% of broadband households in 2009. These 20 million households will be a perfect target for carriers to market their mobile data services.”

Mobile Convergence: Platforms, Applications, and Services surveyed U.S. consumers to reveal trends and attitudes regarding mobile devices and services. For more information, visit http://www.parksassociates.com/ or contact 972-490-1113 or sales@parksassociates.com.

Parks Associates is an internationally recognized market research and consulting company specializing in emerging consumer technology products and services. Founded in 1986, Parks Associates creates research capital for companies ranging from Fortune 500 to small start-ups through market reports, primary studies, consumer research, custom research, workshops, executive conferences, and annual service subscriptions.

Wikipedia has disputed claims that it has lost a huge number of editors that help maintain the online encyclopaedia.

On 26 November it was reported that ten times more editors had left Wikipedia in early 2009 than during the same period in 2008. The group overseeing the reference work said the claims on losses were not accurate, blaming a difference in what counts as an “editor”. By contrast, it said, the numbers of people editing Wikipedia were stable.

In a blog post the Wikimedia Foundation responded to the publication of a report by researcher Dr Felipe Ortega which said that 49,000 editors had departed Wikipedia in the first three months of 2009. Dr Ortega’s comparisons suggest that only about 4,900 left the site in the first few months of 2008.

Full story at bbc.co.uk.

ReD also predicts on the November 27, popularly known as Black Friday, the busiest shopping hour of the year will be between 13:00 to 14:00 when $140 million worth of goods will be purchased online. The peak shopping minute will be at 13:16 when between $2.6 million and $3 million of sales are expected.

On November 30, known as Cyber Monday, the online spending spree looks set to continue. ReD forecasts between 11.2 million and 12.8million online transactions will take place, making Cyber Monday the second busiest online trading day of the year.

Yet again, gift cards are topping the shopping charts across the nation, with the Xbox 360, the Nintendo Wii and DVD box sets following closely behind. This year the American people’s top gift choices are closely mirrored by the fraudsters shopping cart, where the top four products are gift cards, the Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii and the new Xbox game, “Call of Duty. On average fraudsters attempt to spend $248 per transaction online, a staggering 23% more than the average genuine customer.

ReD’s data also shows there is an uneven rate of recovery across the nation in the wake of the credit crunch. For example, online retail growth has been stronger in California, compared to New York, since the beginning of November. Last year Californians were making 10% more purchases online than New Yorkers, and this has now increased to 26%.

“The 23% rise in online sales since November 1 shows green shoots in the US economy for the first time since the catastrophic spending freeze during the same period last year.” says Carl Clump, ReD’s Chief Executive Officer. “However this season’s optimism will be dampened by fraudsters attempting to exploit retailers whilst they are coping with increased demand. We envisage a 38% rise in online fraud attempts on Black Friday compared to the same period last year.”

What’s Hot Online

1) Virtual gift cards and gift cards
2) DVD box sets
- Star trek XI
- Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
- Night at the Museum
- Angels & Demons
- Terminator
3) Nintendo Wii
4) Xbox 360

What’s Hot with Fraudsters

1) Virtual gift cards and gift cards
2) Xbox 360
3) Nintendo Wii
4) The “Call of Duty” Xbox game

Retail Decisions (ReD) is a payment card issuer and world leader in card fraud prevention and payment processing. A specialist supplier to the payments industry worldwide, ReD has over 20 years experience in the fraud prevention market. Its blue-chip international clients come from the global telecommunications, retail, travel, petroleum, banking and the broader e-commerce sectors. They include Wal-Mart, Macy’s, Bloomingdales, Sears, Texaco, Shell, Boots, John Lewis, China Airlines, The Carphone Warehouse, Comet, Travelocity, T-Mobile and Virgin Mobile.

People have been more than a little miffed that their nice searches on things like Judaism have been spoilt by the appearance of racist and anti-Semitic material in search results.

The latest outcry has been about a picture which depicts US First Lady Michelle Obama as a monkey.

The advert signed by the Google Team warns that sometimes Google search results from the Internet can include disturbing content, even for seemingly innocuous queries.

“We assure you that the views expressed by such sites are not in any way endorsed by Google,” it said.

Meanwhile, the much-talked about offensive picture of Michelle Obama is still on the internet. A quick search located it on several sites, such as yesbuthowever.com.

Full story at theinquirer.net.

Google Analytics is a free software service that allows website editors and publishers to get detailed statistics about the number, whereabouts and search behaviour of their visitors.

However according to Zeit Online German officials claim that Google Analytics breaks German data protection laws.

They are thinking of fining outfits that use the service to gather detailed statistics based on their website visitors’ usage patterns without the explicit consent of those visitors.

The authorities could be onto a money spinner as 13 per cent of German website publishers use Google Analytics, including several websites of leading media organisations, political parties and pharmaceutical companies.

Full story at theinquirer.net.

During a two-week period in October, Chitika monitored ad clicks of a sample of 86,683,507 anonymous individuals throughout their 60,000+ publisher network to determine what percentage could be classified as “clickers.” During the two weeks focused on for this study, 1,863,710 of the anonymous individuals actually clicked on an ad at least once, for a 2.15% “clicker” rate.

Unique Users   — 86,683,507

Clickers  — 1,863,710

Non-Clickers  — 84,819,797

Chitika has long championed the idea of knowing when not to show ads, claiming that by being able to accurately predict a user’s likelihood to click, the online advertising world can become at once less intrusive and more effective. Replacing old-media theories of advertising to demographics with predictive targeting towards the people most likely to act on an ad appears more and more viable with improving technology, and can go a long way towards helping online advertising dominate its traditional media counterparts.

Chitika, Inc., is a search-based online advertising network, leading the way in intent-based advertising and search engine insights. Chitika provides publishers with an innovative way to monetize search engine traffic, and advertisers a new way of generating leads with clear consumer intent. With over 60,000 sites and 2 billion monthly impressions, the Chitika network is the pulse of the online world. For more information, visit http://chitika.com/

“Industry research firms agree that enterprises will invest more in private cloud services than in external cloud providers through at least 2012,” said Jingwen Wang, Vice President Products, Platform Computing. “As the market takes off, customers are discovering requirements for building private clouds that virtualization of servers simply cannot address. Platform ISF, first launched as a beta product in June, is a technology-agnostic platform that supports any collection of hardware, operating systems and virtual machines, enabling IT to manage workload across both virtual and physical environments and support multiple hypervisors and operating systems from a single interface.”

Data center IT managers are seeking better ways to utilize their infrastructure assets more effectively, while maintaining or improving application service levels. Private clouds are the solution, but they require the combination of workload scheduling and resource management similar to cluster and grid computing environments. Leveraging Platform Computing’s cluster and grid expertise, Platform ISF addresses the private cloud management challenge enabling IT to achieve more effective use of their resources through metered, self-service access across their entire heterogeneous resource infrastructure.

“By turning portions of our clients’ corporate data centers into private clouds, we’re enabling companies to realize the next wave of consolidation with associated capital and operating cost savings,” said Joe Szalkiewicz, Vice President, Pinnacle Business Solutions, a division of The Pinnacle Group. “Platform ISF provides enterprise scalability through an independent management layer for operating systems and virtual machine provisioning tools.”

SAS, the leader in business analytics, has deployed Platform ISF internally to create a self-service portal for developers, allowing them to quickly and reliably provision and deploy compute and application resources. “We wanted our cloud to include both physical and virtual servers, possibilities not supported by our virtual machine management tools alone,” said Cheryl Doninger, R&D director at Cary, NC-based SAS. “It was also important that we have robust application programming and management interfaces to simplify and abstract our heterogeneous environment for our private cloud. Platform ISF provides everything we need to flexibly provision all our resources and move between physical and virtual machines when needed.”

According to Forrester principal analyst James Staten, as printed in The Industry Standard in the June 2009 article titled “Platform Computing tackles tech-agnostic cloud management,” “Platform ISF meets all the requirements needed in a cloud management product: a workload distribution engine; an infrastructure aggregation layer; a self-service portal for IT administrators; metering and monitoring; and robust APIs for integration with third-party tools. We believe [Platform ISF] is perhaps the most complete internal cloud software solution we’ve seen so far.”

Platform ISF is now publicly available for purchase and is also available for free download trials on http://www.platform.com/clouds/platform-isf. Platform ISF pricing is based on a per CPU socket license for each physical host managed as part of the Platform ISF cloud starting at US$795.

Platform Computing is the leader in cluster, grid and cloud management software — serving more than 2,000 of the world’s most demanding organizations. For 17 years, our workload and resource management solutions have delivered IT responsiveness and lower costs for enterprise and HPC applications. Platform has strategic relationships with Cray, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Red Hat, and SAS. Visit www.platform.com.

Plus, we thought we would tell you that we have recently added a new feature to the website – Classifieds. This is a free service, and allows all readers to advertise goods or services. Obviously, spam and other such abuse of the system will be rejected as we will try to make the section a useful area for our readers.

Thanks again.

For foreign automobile manufacturers, the Chinese market is a piece of cake, but dividing the market share depends entirely on consumers. Catering to consumers’ tastes is the key to capturing the market. Foreign auto manufacturers always keep this in mind, and Mercedes-Benz and Audi are no exceptions. Chinese demand for compact SUVs has increased, and even though these high-end brands are high-priced, they also rate high among consumers.

High-end car buyers primarily decide to purchase based on one main factor — recognition of the aesthetic appearance. From this perspective, the Audi Q5 and Mercedes-Benz GLK represent two completely different design styles.

Audi Q5 body has typical design features, so even without the brand logo, it is clearly Audi. Audi Q5 models, with an overall strong appearance, have the engine hatch cover and the front of the arc-shaped transition, which represent simplicity and perfection.

Opposed to the Q5, the Mercedes-Benz GLK, due to a mixture of C-class and G-class design elements, appears rigid and tough. GLK’s appearance has its own personality.

In short, the Q5 and GLK characteristics take two completely different routes. GLK’s appearance combines toughness and style, and might not fit everyone’s “glamorous” type. When grouped with the city-based SUVs, it is a bit out of tune. GLK from the pedals to the luggage racks has more of a sense of masculinity. The Q5 fits better with city life; it is bigger than other sedans, and compared with off-road vehicles, it is more relaxed and casual. For body size, the two cars have little difference, but the combination of the different design methods makes the visual difference quite clear. The Q5 is wider and flatter with a heavy feeling. While GLK is relatively thin, these two cars’ wheel sizes are 20 inches, and because Q5 is the sports version, the style of wheels is more powerful and sporty. GLK rear wheels are 255mm, which is wider than the front wheels at 235mm (while the Q5 front and rear wheel are 255mm width). For more information about automobiles please refers to http://www.frbiz.com/ .

Himfr.com is a promising e-commerce company and a leading vertical search engine company in China. Himfr.com offers a variety of high quality products such as car alarm systems (http://www.frbiz.com/q-car_alarm_systems/ ), hand vacuum pump (http://www.frbiz.com/q-hand_vacuum_pump/ ), bridal jackets (http://www.frbiz.com/q-bridal_jackets/ ), return air grille (http://www.frbiz.com/q-return_air_grille/ ) and many more.

“People use Google because it helps them find what they are looking for – in short, Google optimizes consumer relevance,” says Ryan. “Yet, despite Google’s virtually unparalleled success, few online advertisers, especially online vehicle advertisers, leverage Google’s powerful, yet simple secret in managing their own internet business. With Consumer Optimization, dealers will be positioned to create a new power shift – the shift away from irrelevance.”

Consumer Optimization techniques focus on the features, qualities and benefits that set one dealer’s vehicles apart from others. Similar to Search Engine Optimization, which optimizes a web page so it ranks higher, Consumer Optimization techniques allow pre-owned automotive dealers to optimize their online vehicle ads to rank higher with consumers and be more likely chosen over their competitors.

In addition to Ryan, senior vice president and general manager for FirstLook’s Elite Operations Division, David Nelson, will present “The New Four Square” during the Digital Dealer Conference. Nelson will discuss the fundamental shift that has taken place in pre-owned vehicle sales – from a confrontational negotiation bases solely on price to a win-win negotiation based on consumer values, or M.A.R.K. factors: Mission, Affordability, Risk and Key Differentiators.

More than 45 exhibitors and 500 attendees are expected for this year’s Digital Dealer Conference to be held November 1 – 3 in Nashville, Tennessee.

FirstLook’s 360 degree Market Navigation Tools allow dealers to tap market data, and execute pre-owned operations best practices. For more information contact FirstLook at 800-730-5665.

Facebook was awarded $711 million in a judgment Thursday against self-described “spam king” Sanford Wallace.

Judge Jeremy Fogel of the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California granted Facebook’s application for a default judgment against Wallace for violating the Can-Spam Act, which bans “false and misleading” marketing e-mails. Fogel also found that Wallace “willfully violated” a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction issued in the case and referred the matter to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for prosecution of criminal contempt.

“The record demonstrates that Wallace willfully violated the statutes in question with blatant disregard for the rights of Facebook and the thousands of Facebook users whose accounts were compromised by his conduct,” Fogel wrote in his judgment order, which also permanently prohibits Wallace from accessing the Facebook Web site or creating a Facebook account, among other restrictions.

Facebook said the order should serve as a strong deterrent against spammers.

“While we don’t expect to receive the vast majority of the award, we hope that this will act as a continued deterrent against these criminals,” Sam O’Rourke, Facebook’s lead counsel for litigation and intellectual property, wrote in a Facebook blog post. “This is another important victory in our fight against spam. We will continue to pursue damages against other spammers.”

Click here to read the full story at cnet.com.

As many as one in every 500 web addresses posted on Twitter lead to sites hosting malware, according to researchers at Kaspersky Labs who have deployed a tool that examines URLs circulating in tweets.

The spread of malware is aided by the popular use of shortened URLs on Twitter, which generally hide the real website address from users before they click on a link, preventing them from self-filtering links that appear to be dodgy.

Kaspersky, an anti-virus and computer-security firm based in Moscow, created a tool called Krab Krawler, which extracts URLs from millions of tweets a day. The tools expands shortened URLs to examine words in the web address for those matching known malware sites. For unknown sites, Kaspersky visits the web page to determine if it’s hosting malicious code that could infect visitors.

About 26 percent of Twitter messages contain a URL, according to Costin Raiu, chief security expert at Kaspersky. About half of those appear to be generated by spammers or by people with malicious intent, he said. These URLs get spread quickly in re-tweets.

ColdFusion 9 Enterprise and Standard editions are available in the Hosting.com Cloud Enterprise, Cloud Dedicated and Dedicated Hosting platforms. Cloud Enterprise, starting as low as $125 per month, provides on-demand cloud hosting via a secure web portal so businesses can rapidly deploy virtual servers and modify resources as needed — and provides high availability and elasticity to each client. Cloud Enterprise requires no contracts and clients can purchase, provision and add CPU, RAM, and DISK online in as little as one minute.

The ColdFusion 9 release unveils unrivaled productivity with features such as Server Manager, Microsoft Office and SharePoint interoperability, enhanced Adobe Flash integration, additional AJAX controls, new object-relational mapping, and ColdFusion-as-a-Service. ColdFusion 9 accelerates the development cycle by reducing complex and powerful business logic into a few lines of code.

“For more than 10 years, ColdFusion hosting has been a critical element of the Hosting.com brand,” says Matt Ferrari, Hosting.com Director of Platform Engineering. “We are positive that the addition of ColdFusion to our Cloud Enterprise environment will provide enhancements to the existing ColdFusion community and will attract new ColdFusion users.”

Hosting.com is also offering a ColdFusion 9 Trial Program to provide free hosted accounts until November 20, 2009 to allow users to preview and explore the functionality of the new release. Sign up for the free ColdFusion 9 Trial Program at http://www.hosting.com/cf9 .

Hosting.com provides enterprise colocation, cloud computing, dedicated hosting, managed hosting, disaster recovery, and business continuance services to a global customer base demanding a high level of security, reliability, and responsiveness. Hosting.com monitors, manages, and enhances the Web-based platforms of Web 2.0 companies, software as a service (SaaS) providers, content distribution networks (CDN), and medium to large enterprises whose Web presence is crucial and high availability mandatory.

By Charles Arthur

The internet regulator Icann has approved plans to let web addresses be written in non-Latin characters – such as Mandarin, Arabic, Hindu or Russian Cyrillic script – that it says represents the “biggest change” to how it works since its invention 40 years ago.

The proposal would mean that domain names – such as guardian.co.uk – could be written in the other languages and be understood natively by the machines that connect computers together over the web.

The first such Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) could be up and running by the middle of next year, said Rod Beckstrom, the president of Icann, which oversees the development of such technologies online.

“Of the 1.6 billion users today worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not Latin-based,” Beckstrom said at the opening of Icann’s conference in Seoul, South Korea, this week. The conference approved the change today, its last day, following more than nine years of work and two years of testing.

Click here to read the full story at The Guardian.

Today is the internet’s 40th birthday. Well, not exactly the internet but Arpanet – the Pentagon-funded research project that is the predecessor to the internet. Forty years ago, a simple message “Lo” (it was supposed to be “Login”, but the system crashed) was sent between two computers at two Californian research labs and a net was born. What happened next – the development of the now global internet, the web that you are reading this on – has had an impact on all of us. Last week, the Guardian published an interactive people’s history of the internet telling the story of how that happened and interviewing some of the people who made it so.

Charley Kline and Bill Duvall – who made that first connection between the University of California and the Stanford Research Institute – are in there, as are pioneers of politics, social interaction and gaming online.

Kline admits the importance was not recognised at the time. “It was neat that it was working … but nobody recognised that it was the beginning of something,” he says – but what would develop from that first connection has had a huge influence on how we live today.

It is also worth remembering the perhaps unexpected nature of those who made this military-funded network. Oliver Burkeman spoke to Leonard Kleinrock, the UCLA professor who led the project, for a complementary piece on how the internet changed the world for ever, noting that the Arpanet’s development into what we have today was never inevitable.

Click here to read the full story at The Guardian.

VClouds users will now have the ability to archive email for an unlimited period of time in the “Cloud.” Users can archive and store emails based on user groups, content, or simply companywide. Information is securely encrypted and can be accessed on a permission only basis via numerous parameters. Archives are conveniently retrievable through various search options including date, time, user, direction, and subject.

“This is a really exciting step for VClouds as it enables customers in all sectors to very simply archive their email without the headache of managing storage and policies. We are especially excited about what this can do in the education sector in the US where inexpensive archiving is becoming an absolute must,” stated Owen Dukes, Commercial Advisor to the Board of VClouds Limited.

“We believe in helping our customers to be compliant in every possible way, be that through email retention policies, filtering content in the cloud or alerting administrators to a breach in corporate policy. With the launch of our new archiving module, we just empowered organizations to tick more boxes on their compliance requirement sheet,” stated David Lovatt, President and CEO of VClouds Limited.

VClouds Ltd is a global provider of Email Management Software offering both a Hosted Service and a platform developed specifically for large IT Service Providers with their own DataCenter infrastructure. Delivering ‘Cloud Based’ services through a Security as a Service model, VClouds system will scan emails for spam, viruses, breaches in corporate compliance policy, monitors, and polices Data Leaks within corporate emails. All of our services are managed through one easy to administer web portal and are charged on a ‘per user, per month’ basis making working with Cloud a simple process.

IJJ Corp is a Diversified Technologies company focused on developing high tech solutions for the government and the private sector to provide rapid decisions through information processing. The Company’s technologies include: Voice, Data and Video Rapid Conferencing Solutions; Disaster Shelter Recovery Systems; Mobile Disaster Management Systems; Medical Hospital Advisor Systems; IT Management and Consulting Services; Secure Data Center Services; Network Operation Centers; and Enterprise Management Power Suites. The Company’s objective is to continue to develop and integrate services and products in order to provide the most comprehensive, cutting edge, turnkey solutions to its clients.

“What makes SocialiSoft’s solution special is that it is integrated on top of Jive Software,” Nielsen said. “This builds the energy of our existing online community of customers, developers, and partners by creating a great deal of content, focus and forums but also, by flowing large numbers of VMware customers and partners into our online virtual community when they might not have joined before.”

David Nelson-Gal, CEO of SocialiSoft, identified this as a key focus of the market for online event software. “So many people have historically thought of their events, User Conferences, Technical Conferences, Sales Kickoffs, and the like, as something to be setup and then torn down when the event is over. The power of Web 2.0 technologies is that these kinds of events are merely milestones on a continuously networked conversation between you, your customers and your partners. This is why we integrated with existing community platforms like those offered by Jive Software so that the event is naturally part of your existing community as opposed to an isolated silo.”

“We see SocialiSoft’s approach as very innovative,” said David Greenberg, Senior Director of Marketing for Jive Software. “Hosting online customer events without integrating them into your online community is just a missed opportunity.”

“As a community manager,” Nielsen continued,. “I am absolutely focused on growing our VMware online community by making sure there is relevancy and value for the community members. Beyond helping solve problems, people like feeling that they are part of something. SocialiSoft, with our Jive Software implementation helps us achieve those goals. Hitting the 100,000 mark definitely tells us we are doing something right.”