This has been an interesting week for digital media. First, there was the IAB’s Ecosystem 2.0 annual conference in Phoenix at which there was a lot of speculation about whether Yahoo! really has a vision, whether a merger with Microsoft make sense and other horse race issues. Meanwhile, Nielsen is struggling with measuring an increasingly fragmented media audience. The New York Times has an excellent article entitled “Nielsen Looks Beyond TV, and Hits Roadblocks”

Despite the skittishness of consumers, Nielsen is pressing ahead with a strategy it calls Anytime Anywhere Media Measurement — or A2/M2. The goal is one day to track media consumption everywhere, much of it from the same people. The broader focus has demanded that the company introduce more consumer panels, and it now runs 16 of them (excluding Project Apollo), up from five panels 10 years ago.

At Yankee Group, we’re big fans of the anywhere concept. Much of our consumer research is founded on the same assumption — that it’s the same people who watch cable TV, catch up with programs online, download other content to portable devices and access other programming on mobile devices. Our work is by no means a replacement for the in-depth measurement the media industry gets from Nielsen, but it’s a common point of departure that we use to develop a vision and roadmap for the future.

I’d like to thank the Academy…

With this in context, I was overjoyed to see an ad campaign from the Emmys announcing the inclusion of internet video in the Primetime Emmys®. Nice work on the creative. It made me smile.

Our internet video analyst is Anton Denissov, and this announcement was made on his birthday. He had the day off, but I can’t think of a better present.

Is it just me, or has the Blackberry gone chav? The thought struck me today as the nanny arrived, clutching a spanking new model.

Of course, I don’t mean to imply that she’s a chav. She’s a nice girl from Poland with tidy manners.

But somehow, I couldn’t see how she could afford to own a Blackberry (not that I’m a skinflint employer). Or rather, that she’d prioritize its ownership over a DKNY hoodie or whatever designer frippery you buy when you’re still in your 20s. Unless, of course, the Blackberry has become a real object of desire for this demographic.

It would have been a good question to ask Robin Bienfait, CIO of RIM when I met her recently. After all, here’s a woman who holsters not one but two Blackberries onto her designer handbag. See photo I snapped below: they travel in pairs!

Read the rest of this entry »

Barely two months into the year, and I’m already sick of the word engagement. All this talk about rings, advertising…whatever you want to call it. There is too little engagement — and at the same time — too much talk about it.

Last week, I was at VideoEgg’s Engagement Debate ‘08 in New York. It was a well-produced and meaningful discussion about the future of digital marketing across all media. Industry luminaries took the time to talk things through, to moderate panels, and to share their considered thoughts. It was (and I don’t say this often) worth the time. Even the extra two hours I spent at LaGuardia airport waiting for seat 13C on a Canadair CL-65.

Spend an hour sitting next to an airplane lavatory, and you’ll start thinking about what engagement really means.

Now, I’m as guilty as the next person in digital advertising of using this word a little too much. But once you spend a day with people who feel obligated to bring it up, that’s when you know that it’s time to find something else.

But it’s not that simple to replace a word that’s a placeholder for something else…without finding a suitable replacement. The idea of engagement makes sense as a way of describing an experience with advertising that’s more than direct response and something shy of a pure brand advertising experience.

Perhaps engagement is just a way to contextualize something that already exists today. Perhaps it’s a way to give lipservice to measured advertising performance while putting a name to something that continues to defy quantification. After all, according to Universal McCann, national advertisers will spend $50.5 billion on television advertising in the US this year. Those are dollars that don’t have to explain themselves in terms of click-throughs or conversions.

That’s the point. Advertising creates marketing synergies…but that’s a different buzzword.

Thanks again to VideoEgg. They put on an excellent event.

Let me be a nay sayer about global recession. In fact, if it happens at all, I’m betting recession will be a blessing in disguise for service providers worldwide.

Recently, the fat cats kibitzing over their fondues at the Davos World Economic Forum were eager to predict doom. They point to the turgid U.S. economy for evidence, and expect a global domino effect.

But I question how far this ill wind will blow.

The resurgence of the fiber optic cable market is a case in point. With few exceptions, the routing of new cables coming into service over the next few years illustrates the uncoupling of the U.S. economy from its central role. Instead, forthcoming cables such as Reliance Flag’s NGN system, IMEWE, TGN Eurasia, SEACOM and others are putting emerging economies on a redefined global map where interaction with Europe – and each other – figures large.

And let’s not forget the recently upgraded and expanded routes of Russia’s Transtelecom and Rostelecom which streamline trans-continental connectivity between Europe and Asia.

What we’re witnessing is the growth of new trade axes redefining traffic streams and demand.

Read the rest of this entry »

Greetings everyone! I’m Andrew Jaquith, a security analyst at Yankee Group.

The attraction of posting to this blog was plain, because it is about what we at Yankee Group call Anywhere. At its core, our mission is to forecast how mobility, miniaturization, exploding numbers of form factors, plentiful bandwidth and networked applications will change our lives. We expect that carriers, corporations and consumers alike will benefit from a rising tide of innovation that will bring us new forms of entertainment, commerce and access to information.

With that in mind, it is with a mix of resignation and bemusement that I was recently asked to respond to a study by security vendor Sophos about malware predictions for a particular platform (how very 2001), in this case the Mac. You can read the story (which includes my comments), but I’ll save you the time and cut to the chase. According to Sophos, “93 percent believed malware writers would increasingly target the Mac in the future.”

I’m not really sure what to make of this study. While I recognize that not all of the security vendors speak with one voice, the narrative on the subject of Macs and viruses has gotten so twisted that it would make Ernö Rubik gasp.

First, the line was “Watch out! Mac users will, we are very very sure, be targets of malware in the very near future.” This was generally accompanied by, “Mac users need to stop living in a false paradise!” But now, according to Sophos, Mac users aren’t living in a false paradise after all, because they “expect to see more malware.” So which is it? Are Mac users all beret-wearing, latté-sipping artistes that don’t have a clue about security, or are they world-weary realists warily awaiting their next attack?

Of course, it doesn’t really matter. Frankly, all of these things are just justifications to sell more OS X software. And Sophos’study should be seen for what it is: a publicity event in service of that goal.More broadly speaking, though, all of this hot air about Mac versus PC security has nothing to do with the real problem: cyber criminals trying to trick end users so that they can take over their PCs, steal money or steal account credentials. That’s a platform-agnostic problem.

For Anywhere Consumers — who use whatever operating system they want — the targeted device or platform is much less important than the goal of the attacker. The story really ought to be about whether end-users are safe, educated and aware, not what platform they use. It is high time for the dialogue to shift to the post-platform security era. Let’s stop the usual finger-pointing, schadenfreude and scare-mongering.

I know most bloggers will understand it when I say that it’s good to be back. Since July 2007, I’ve been without a voice. An online voice that is.

Seven long months.

I signed off from the Mobile Enterprise Weblog on Jul 24, and it’s been agonizing to cram everything into tightly-controlled and edited research documents. After all, what can you say in 1,500 words?

The argument could be what can’t you say in 1,500 words. It depends on the audience. For readers out there, and those of you in the blogosphere, you know what I mean. A good, lead-me-down-the-path post is worth its weight in gold. Whatever the length.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine sent me an e-mail to let me know that I had been quoted in Time Magazine. An above-the-fold quote

But the Internet doesn’t work the way the software business works. Yes, it runs on computers, but the Internet is part of the media now, where choice rules. Says Daniel Taylor, a senior analyst with the Yankee Group: “In the technology business, they say you’ve always got to choose between us and them, between our technology and theirs. That’s what Microsoft has done. Yahoo! is a really good property for them, but I don’t think they are going to be able to pull it off.”

But honestly. The thing that meant the most to me was to get a mention from Barbara French at Tekrati. I keep Barbara’s RSS feed going every day, and I agonized over whether or how I should announce that I was taking a position at Yankee Group. I figured that this was something best left to my new employer. I told my friends and colleagues. By October, word of my new role had propagated far enough, and it led to this piece: Four high-profile bloggers turn analyst.

Four high-profile bloggers have recently become vCard-carrying members of the ICT industry analyst community. First, it was Daniel Taylor returning to the analyst ranks at Yankee Group. Next, David Tebbut joined Freeform Dynamics. Yesterday, Jeremiah Owyang joined Forrester Research and Matthew Aslett joined The 451 Group. And just in time for Oktoberfest, too.

I’ve always believed that the collective reputation of “the analysts” depends on the quality of the people filling the jobs. If so, prospects for the analysts are looking pretty good.

Thanks, Barbara. I’ll have a märzen for you.

In the meantime, I’ve checked back with my former blogger colleagues from the mobility space. Thanks to Judy Breck, the Carnival of the Mobilists is up and running and at #111. Carlo Longino is ticking away at MobHappy. John Sun is continuing his mission at Mobile Analyst Watch. Anders Borg is still writing his Mobile News segment. And C. Enrique Ortiz is busy with his Mobility Weblog. There are many others. David Beers came to mind, but his blog has been quiet. And I haven’t read Ken Camp in a while.

In revisiting the pages of these wonderful weblogs, I was expecting to see that we were on diverging paths. They would be thinking about mobility, and I would be focused on digital advertising and marketing. My colleagues at Yankee Group draw strong — but artificial — distinctions between mobile and online, entertainment and advertising, and so on and so forth. This is the nature of research. We draw lines. Define coverage areas. And get to the business of analyzing.

My world centers around digital media, internet video, social networks, and gaming. Anywhere advertising comes into play. Mobility is important enough to have a separate team of analysts. So you can imagine my surprise when I revisited the carnival only to see extensive discussions about how social networking, gaming and video all relate to mobile environments.

Perhaps that’s the point. At Yankee, we talk a lot about what we call “Anywhere” which is driven by ubiquitous broadband connectivity. We say that it doesn’t matter how you connect, because you’re connected. You’re connecting to an application, to media, or even to each other. That’s what’s driving things.

And that may very well be the reason why I’m at Yankee Group. I came to the conclusion that enterprise mobility would just become part of enterprise computing. And the same goes for media, entertainment and social networks — the mobile component is just…well…part of the whole.

Yesterday, I was at an event in New York City. I was talking to a media company executive responsible for digital advertising. I mentioned internet video, and she shut the discussion down with a simple sweep of her hand — “we know that there’s scale in internet video. I’m not interested in that.” I was wondering where the conversation was headed. “But,” she said, “what are you doing in mobile marketing?”

There are moments when it’s truly wonderful to be an analyst. That was one of those times. For the bloggers who were wondering where I was. I’m back. Back in the analyst community.

With rumors swirling that HP is poised to release the HP Compaq 2133, a “sub-notebook” (a term used by CNET meaning a device smaller than a notebook but larger than an ultra-mobile PC) there is an increased likelihood that a flood of followers will surely litter the market with similarly sized devices expecting  to find gold at the end of the rainbow.

Despite HP’s entry and Asus’s success with its EEE PC, the smaller than a notebook PC category continues to have form factor issues. Will devices be small enough to be appreciably more portable than similarly priced but larger sized notebooks but not too small to hinder productivity beyond responding to e-mail.

Ultimately the question becomes, is there a form factor that is more appealing to a mobile consumer than a notebook or a handset and if so, what is it? Is it a UMPC? A sub notebook? A sub-sub notebook? A nano notebook? A sub nano notebook? How many iterations must consumer’s endure and not adopt before manufacturer’s find the magic formula, or simply give up and realize today’s technology adequately meets consumer needs.

Perhaps positioning the device as a computing technology is a mistake and HP’s claimed strategy of making it a lifestyle device makes sense – it certainly has worked for Apple. But marketing mumbo-jumbo aside do these devices even satiate a consumer need? Are laptops really that  inefficient? Are handsets really that ineffective? Must one be more productive than sending e-mail while waiting to cross the street?

The simple fact is that shrinking a category’s form factor can hardly be considered innovation. In order to truly create a new paradigm in portable computing manufacturers must forego shrinking devices to eke out marginal efficiencies and rethink the role and purpose of the PC in a world of ubiquitous connectivity, as done by the innovators recently highlighted in PC World.  Only by redefining the product category will manufacturer’s be able to meet the needs of today’s and more importantly tomorrow’s anywhere consumer.

Books: in this age of blogs, IM, and Twittering, so 19th century! But still such a great way to set out an important idea.

It’s not easy to keep up, as the stack on my nightstand will attest, but I’m a voracious reader of non-fiction, particularly those on technology’s impact on us as consumers and business leaders. As I meet with technology executives on both sides of the aisle (developers and deployers, that is!), I’ve probably given out 100 books on these topics in the past two years. One exec who really liked one of my choices for him suggested I start up an on-line book club, so he could find out what else he should be reading.

Fair enough; here it is, via the blog. All you have to do to participate is to take the RSS feed (top-right-hand corner of my main blog page), and then watch for posts in the “YG book club” category. Here are two books I’m reading right now:

• Founders at Work I love story-telling, and I love technology; this book combines the two in an entertaining format, presenting interviews with a wide variety of recent and historical figures in the high-tech startup space.
• Marketing to the Social Web Full disclosure: the author is a friend as well as a member of Yankee Group’s Board of Directors. It’s still a valuable book with advice about how to market in a two-way context to the empowered Anywhere Consumer.

What are you reading these days that I might enjoy?

As we start to think like Anywhere Consumers — taking our experiences with us wherever we go — dependable demand for mobile payments is beginning to emerge. An upcoming Yankee Group report takes a broad look at the future now that both consumer appetite and device penetration is catching up to the long-imagined potential.

I’d assumed that one big challenge to making it real still has to be dealing with the two established parts of the system: the carriers over whose networks these activities take place, and the banks whose accounts are tapped for transfers. Talk about getting between a rock and a hard place — both have a large stake in any change and plenty of downside risk.

But Lisa Stanton, CEO of Monitise Americas, a mobile banking and payments service firm, says at least some banks haven’t been that hard to win over. Since Monitise’s approach is through the ATM network, they don’t have to get into the bank’s IT guts, and thus can get something happening quickly. And mobile customers don’t have to be online banking users — which matches up better with the Facebook generation.

“When I first took this job, I asked a friend in banking to hear my first pitch — really just as a test. We went through it all with her team, and answered a few questions. She looked around the table at her people, their heads nodded, then she said, ‘OK.’ I said, ‘OK… what?’ ‘OK, we’ll do it!’ It’s been like that pretty much since then.” She admits it’s partly a matter of the right targets; smaller banks are less likely to have a viable internally-led alternative.

My wallet photos have already moved to my mobile. The sooner I can replace the rest of its contents, the better. Sign me up!

In a ubiquitously connected world, any device that can benefit from connectivity is going to get it. Our collective imagination about what this might do to the world of things we use everyday has yet to be uncorked.

But David Rose, founder of Ambient Devices, continues to come up with great ideas here. Ambient makes the umbrella I love to talk about, which uses the network to tell you if you are going to need it. Another venture of his, called Vitality, is launching a connected pill-bottle — which uses the net to report if you’re successful in taking your medication.

Yankee Group believes the mobile internet will eventually be swarming with connected devices — things that are more valuable to us than their disconnected forebears because they can send and receive key bits of information. David and I agree that the business models for that aren’t too clear just yet. There seem to be three right now:

1. Discrete: the consumer buys the device from one source, and pays separately for the service that makes it useful (TVs, wireline phones, and the WiFi camera storage card I just bought that uses WiFi you’re already subscribed to)
2. Service-led: the consumer gets the device from the network provider, and pays the provider for the service experience (this, of course, is the current prevailing model for mobile phones and cable TV boxes)
3. Device-led: The consumer gets the device from a source that has folded the service and its cost into the device price (Amazon’s Kindle: the network cost to download the media is included in the media price)

I don’t know of many other examples of the device-led model, but I think it might be the most promising way to accelerate connected things for consumers — just wrap in the service. What other business models might I be missing?