3G Smart phones in China: 1M growth a month?

I was reading this article on the wall street journal this morning.


China Unicom Targets Strong 3G Growth

HONG KONG--China Unicom (Hong Kong) Ltd., which started offering Apple Inc.'s iPhone in China last week, aims to increase the number of its third-generation mobile users by more than 1 million a month, Chairman Chang Xiaobing said Tuesday.

The company launched 3G services in China Oct. 1 and had more than 1 million subscribers to the mobile technology standard at the end of that month, Mr. Chang said.

He said China Unicom has signed up more than 5,000 iPhone users in China since it launched the phone there Friday and it expects the Apple phone to boost its average revenue per user.

What really stands out is there was already 1 million + 3G phones in china just waiting for the technology to be supported. Only 5000 of these so far are officially distributed iPhones? With the price of unlocked grey market iPhones being so much less of what the officially distributed iPhones are how can Unicom hope to compete?

Unicom hopes to grow the 3G market by 1 million a month? This is pretty impressive of a goal given that it would most likely have to include both selling a 3G phone and plan. Rather than just the 3G plan to existing 3G phone customers.

Technolgy Media Misinformation

Recently I've been seeing alot of misinformation in the media. I'm not sure why the misinformation machine is gaining more and more steam in the tech sector. Traditionally you had rumors, and reality. Sometimes they were the same, but most often not. The rumors were published as rumors and they were taken with a "that would be nice" or "wtf are they thinking?" grain of salt.

Now it seems that rumors/lies are being published as fact. Misleading headlines on credible websites, or just 100% misleading articles with headlines true to their misleading nature.

In the news today
The best example today is from the PC World website:
iPhone as an eBook Reader Threatens Kindle, Says Report (Nov 2, 2009 8:19 am)
&
iPhone e-Books Don't Threaten Kindle Or Nook ( Nov 2, 2009 9:24 am)

The points to note is both of these posts are blogs and both made a front page spot on googles tech news today at different times.

Where is this coming from?

I'd go so far as to say that misinformation is being used right now more than ever in US politics to discredit the current presidents politics (but I'm young so maybe I'm wrong) . This makes me question - does the average tech blogger think that if the politicians are doing it than its fine for them to do so too? After all for a lot of people I would guess politicians in positions of power are role models.

The biggest problem I think with misinformation on the internet is that it becomes viral. And with unsteady economic markets, as a lie/rumor becomes syndicated across lots of credible sources, mislead readers/investors to their doom! Which I would guess may lead to an even more sensitive economic market.

iPhone vs the Mobile industry

Back when the iPhone came out, while secretly wanting one (until I saw in person how bulky the 1g was), I did not think that they would have as big market penetration as it did.

The odds were against it I thought. An expensive phone which was carried by 1 carrier?!?

It was not that simple. With great marketing from Apple that made everyone want one before they even saw one and no real competition, people changed carriers (those who were not with AT&T) and forked out the cash during a declining economy.

Why was it so easy? No real competition.

- A few manufacturers had touch screen phones, but they were all very slow, and few (if any?) were offered by US carriers.
- I cant recall seeing any marketing as for a smart phone as I did for the iPhone. Great marketing efforts.
- A good app store and good apps. As one of my friends @browntown always says, the great thing about the iphone is the apps.
- A good music store.

What really happened?
Even with all this, Nokia remained king of the market share, RIM remained second, and the Apple with its iPhone only really beat out HTC and some other smaller players. If you take steps back and look at cell phone distribution in general. Apple did not make much/any impact globally.

The other interesting point to note is when Nokia introduced the 5800 it managed to grow its deciding market share. The Nokia 5800 is not a phone I'd put up against the iPhone as far as usability. It lacked a music store (in the US), great apps, and its really just a Symbian OS phone with a touch screen. Nothing really ground breaking. Despite this it did grow Nokia's part of the smartphone market.

And now?

The Linux based Android is slowly gaining steam, its on a bundle of phones and will probably become the dominant OS by outside of what Nokia/Apple/RIM put on their phones.

Nokia is about to release the n900 - this looks very promising. It looks like Nokia is going a totally different direction than everyone else who has been playing catchup with the iphones technology/usability. Nokia is taking a few steps forward of everyone else and will be setting the first benchmarks of having a mobile computer with cell phone capabilities and size.

The n800 uses the Linux based Maemo OS. In a sense you have the flexibility of a laptop that fits in your pocket and is integrated as a cell phone. You also have a huge open source app developing user base just like Android does.

Gartner Worldwide analyst Roberta Cozza said:

“Much of the smartphone growth during the first quarter of 2009 was driven by touchscreen products, both in midtier and high-end devices,” said Roberta Cozza, principal analyst at Gartner, based in Egham, UK. “’Touch for the sake of touch’ was enough of a driver in the midtier space, but tighter integration with applications and services around music, mobile e-mail, and Internet browsing made the difference at the high end of the market.”

The key there I believe is tighter integration with applications and services.

What will happen next.

I believe there will be no single device that has a huge impact against the iPhone and its success, but I do believe that unless apple has something up its sleeve it will slowly loose the majority of market share to both Googles Andriod which will be the standard non-Nokia smart phone OS, and Nokia's Maemo.

RIM? Did I leave them out? Well RIM does have a major market share next to Nokia right now, but I just don't believe they will sustain it. I believe the business suitability of Maemo and Android will phase them out of the picture completely (unless they jump on the Android bandwagon)

So infact the underdog of the OS world. Linux will be the on the majority of mobile devices, just people wont know it. As a Linux enthusiastic since '96 this gets my vote :)

Twitter and the Internet Marketing Machine

Although currently Twitter is more hype than it is popular there a clear sign that it is gaining steam. More and more companies are including it as part of their viral marketing and overall digital customer relationship management programs.

Thinking about the growing popularity let’s take a step back and speculate the future (and partly present)

1. Imagine that the vast majority of companies/brands/products also have twitter profiles.
2. Now imagine that 25% of them are running a sweep/initiatives at at time (lasting a month) which involves you to both following them on twitter and also (the viral aspect) retweeting specific messages regarding their product.
3. The result: Millions of consumers retweeting messages about everything from new female hygene products and CAT scanning machines to specials on pork at your local butcher.
   

Would you unfollow your friends? What if they are all doing it?

Back to reality and the present…

So far we’ve seen this kind of marketing/adverting widespread with iphones (one of them was moonfruit). Mostly the strategy I’ve seen so far on companies using twitter to advance their digital CRM is to use it more of a notification tool on news/products/contests. Well that’s not so bad? It does feel like this is just the entry point/discovery they are doing to get thier feet wet and see what this is really all about. Whats next when they realize potential.. but what is the potential?

..but what is the potential?

Two of the top 5 methods that makes online advertising and marketing really work are:

1. Product relevance
2. Accurate market targeting.

Twitter does not really provide either of these things, but there is a big payout from getting people to twitter about your product/website/competition… Increased search engine ranking through twitters indexing & market awareness.

Increased SEO and Market awareness

One of the fool proof ways to increase your ranking through Search engine optimization is having your website and content referenced all over the web. The more it is the better you do. So if you have 3 million people twittering about your website or product your SEO is not going to be too shabby.

My speculation is that prize hungry consumers will tweet and retweet more and more possibly even putting the tweets up on blogs/forums. The sweeps/competitions which would drive viral marketing measurements up would also potentially drive the attractiveness of twitter down.

Think of those friends that forward you every chain email they get, and then think of how many more people would do the same with clear incentives.

So will twitter continue to grow like it is or will it turn from a great social networking tool into a advertising and marketing spam tool.

Google Q2 revenue beyond expectations

Google reported revenues of $5.52 billion for the quarter ended June 30, 2009. This is 3% more than Q2 2008 and also exceeded general expectations of $4.06 billion.

The wall street general expectation of $4.06 billion sent the stock on a rally just over 10% this week starting at $409 and finishing at $442.

Is this a market sign that digital advertising spending is showing solid growth again?

Google vs Bing: Rose-tinted glasses?

Since the launch of Bing I've been seeing so much media hype ( try search bing on google news ) about Bing, its increasing market share, how it is bypassing yahoo (now on two occasions) as #2, etc. After trying out Bing a few times I started to find it all hard to believe. How was it having the impact I was reading about?

The source of all the latest and greatest on which search engine has what market share is Statcounter. Yet if you look at Statcounter there are two very big misses... almost like we are being presented the facts through rose-tinted glasses.

The Facts ( Statcounter: Jan 01 2009 - July 09 2009 )

1. MSN + Live search = Bing
Bing replaces both MSN search, and Live search (perhaps other Microsoft search tools too?). Combine the usage of these without any marketing dollars and what do you get? Well a little short of where Bing is per Statcounter, but not by much.

It seems to me that forgetting to point out that Bing naturally gets the MSN search and Live search traffic is a good way to show grand results against marketing/promotion dollars. Bing 0% to 10%+ in just a month? Come on? Really?

How much money is Microsoft sinking into Bing, and what is the return against historic MSN and Live search return?

2. Live vs Yahoo
Does anyone notice that this year Windows Live on its own would bypass Yahoo periodically. Did that make headline news? Should that historical data have an impact on the way we look at Bing's data?

Well whats next?
I expect if Microsoft does keep sinking large amounts of marketing dollars into Bing that it will increase its marketing share by minimal amounts. Maybe?

Further Pondering
1. What about Mobile search? Is Microsoft not really taking that seriously? It feels like Google and Yahoo are. With the mobile vs PC search usage in emerging Asian markets will PC search still be something we even pay attention to as a measurement of who holds market share?

2. As Chrome (and in the distant future Chrome OS) pick up market share in their sectors what impact will they have on Search Engine market shares? It feels like Microsoft search tools have already failed at keeping Windows/IE users by presetting their browser search and home page.