In this Yankee Group podcast, Andy Castonguay, Josh Martin, Josh Holbrook, and Jeffrey Breen discuss the future of Black Friday.

Black Friday podcast (mp3 / 2.9MB / 06:16)

Think the credit crunch is killing the advertising market? Think again.

I’ve been tracking the number of ad circular pages printed on Thanksgiving in our local newspaper, The Boston Globe (West Edition), for the last six years to get a flavor for how the economy and advertising markets are doing. At my prior firm, we found advertising and marketing spending to be a leading indicator for how well the economy will do in the future. While this count is unscientific and non-Anywhere in nature, I think of it as a “canary in the coal mine” indicator. If stores don’t advertise for Black Friday as much as they have in years past, you can bet there is going to be economic trouble.

Well, this year, the canary is happily singing its little heart out — there were 600 ad pages in today’s Thanksgiving paper, up 17% over last year’s 512. In fact, it’s only 36 pages off from the 2006 peak of 636.
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On today’s Yankee Group Podcast Josh Martin, Andy Castonguay, Josh Holbrook, and Jeffrey Breen tackle what the Xbox Experience means, how Playstation 3 fights back, the prospects of Boxee, how Netflix is making waves, the viability of Blu-ray, and the future of the connected home.

The Digital Divide podcast (mp3 / 4.3MB / 04:43)

There are 1000+ mobile devices — and still counting — a proliferation which enriches the lives of consumers in ways unforeseen just a few years ago. The cell phone has evolved from providing simple voice features to being an essential part of the consumer’s connectedness to the world. Today’s mobile devices have also driven enormous market activity and innovation as new ecosystems
and new players emerge.

We’ve all shared stories about feeling more lost without our cell phones than without our wallets. As Yankee Group views it, the role of low-cost devices will enable the Anywhere connectivity revolution to touch twice as many people as the PC revolution reached in the past 20 years. Our research focuses on the devices and trends that are transforming how people access and interact with the Anywhere Network.

Today, the evolution of mobile devices is one of the most interesting and rapidly changing domains in the Anywhere economy as the inherent nature of mobility demands a unique mix of new services, applications, technologies and user interfaces. These devices will rapidly get smarter and we will see new winners and losers.

I am very pleased to share with you that Andy Castonguay, Yankee Group Director of Research, is now leading our investigations of this intersection of experience and electronics, replacing John Jackson who has decided to leave Yankee Group to pursue other opportunities. Well recognized in the industry and a long-time member of the Yankee Group team, Andy brings a unique perspective to our research on Access Devices that helps our clients understand the role of the mobile consumer device in a larger context. He will study how the interplay between consumer attitudes, behaviors and readiness and network technologies powers the development and adoption of new services, business models and ecosystems.

Hear from Andy in his own words in his latest podcasts: iPhone: “great for Apple, terrible for AT&T” and handsets for the holidays.

In this Yankee Group podcast, Andy Castonguay, Josh Martin, Josh Holbrook, and Jeffrey Breen discuss the difficulties of giving handsets for the holidays.

handsets podcast (mp3 / 6.4MB / 06:48)

In this podcast, Yankee Group’s device expert Andy Castonguay argues that while device manufacturers and mobile carriers share in the rewards of exclusive handset arrangements, the bulk of the risk is borne by the carrier: “great for Apple, terrible for AT&T.”

Josh Martin, Josh Holbrook, and Jeffrey Breen join Andy in this discussion of carrier subsidies and consumer buying trends in the context of the current economic downturn.

OEMs win, carriers lose podcast (mp3 / 10.5MB / 11:24)

Not my own prom, but not far from it

OK, so it didn’t involve limos, corsages, and crepe paper, but thirty years after my last prom, last week I went to another one.

At least that’s what Kevin Krupky, legislative counsel for Alcatel-Lucent and my date for the evening, called it. What it really was, was the annual dinner hosted by the FCBA for the chairman of the FCC. Just Kevin, me, a head table stacked with FCC commissioners and former chairmen, and about 1500 D.C.-based telecom lawyers and lobbyists.

What a scene — as full of potential for sociological dissection as any real prom. Given the outgoing status of FCC chair Kevin Martin, the table-hopping was less pronounced around him and more noticeable among the big K Street lobbying firms. In the frantic card exchanges, you could see signs of the game of musical chairs now underway with the likely shift of direction in U.S. telecommunications policy.

Martin’s after-dinner remarks had the anticipated roast feel; he claimed sponsorship of the ‘No Lawyer Left Behind’ Act due to his salvos at the cable industry’s bundling practices, and bemoaned the worsening economics in the sector, suggesting that “Comcast couldn’t even afford to hire seatwarmers to not laugh at my jokes.”

Underneath the jocularity, worries bubbled up at every table. “It took an economic meltdown and an election to do it, but in a few short weeks, ‘regulation’ has gone from a bad word to a good word,” rued one lobbyist. Another observed the reduction in the number of tables hosted by troubled firms like Motorola and Sprint Nextel. But the big worry, which I heard all evening as well as in meetings earlier that day at the USTA: Will the new administration’s support for expanding broadband access be twinned with ‘net neutral’ regulation?

Fair question. If that worry is realized, it will punish every network operator that has depended on lobbying to solve that threat rather than service differentiation. The answer that will skirt this trap while paying bigger financial dividends than lobbying bills is investing in the tools to create tiered connectivity services to consumers.

I enjoyed the dinner, though, even if I didn’t stay long enough to see who the prom King and Queen were.

The movement toward Anywhere, Yankee Group’s term for the emergence of ubiquitous connectivity, is spurring a change in how consumers access information. With the advent of full-featured Web-browsing phones like Apple’s iPhone and the T-Mobile/Google G1, demand for user-friendly, well-designed and effective mobile Web sites is increasing exponentially. This demand is creating both challenges and opportunities for companies to communicate effectively in this evolving medium.

Today’s Anywhere Web sites are already serving millions of consumers, yet not a single mobile Web site scores a passing grade on Yankee Group’s Mobile Web Scorecard, a methodology developed specifically to evaluate how well sites adapt to mobile users, devices and networks to create an Anywhere experience. Results from the Mobile Web Scorecard conclude that the businesses and designers best positioned to succeed will be those who objectively measure their progress rather than guess about which features to change.

This webinar featured three industries – air travel, financial services and shopping – and highlighted Yankee Group’s assessment of the best of the Anywhere Web. The presentation included:

• Common consumer challenges when accessing today’s mobile Web sites
• Simple improvements and recommendations to better serve consumers
• Breakdown of the Mobile Web Scorecard
• Winners in today’s mobile Web arena

The webinar runs about an hour: audio (mp3) and slides (pdf).

Microsoft continues to tweak the Zune’s music subscription plan, but is it time to pull the plug on the brand? Yankee Group Senior Analyst Josh Martin and Chief Technology Officer Jeffrey Breen discuss the history — and the fate — of Zune.

Zune podcast (mp3 / 2.0MB / 04:12)

Spent a day with nice folks at Tekelec the other day.  I know them pretty well so there were no big surprises in terms of product strategy—they are signaling specialists on both the SS7 and IP side of the telco network and they have some ancillary products that build off of that position of strength.  They’ve been excelling in this area for years.   The question that always hounded them was, “what happens to Tekelec once when everything goes IP”??  Theoretically, with the SS7 footprint getting smaller and smaller, companies like Tekelec would be left out of the party without a drastic re-invention.  Its actually not true.

First of all, the idea that signaling issues go away with the introduction of layer 5 IP session control protocols like SIP is a pipe dream.  In fact, they may even be exacerbated given the fragmentation that we’ve witnessed in terms of proprietary SIP extensions softswitch and IMS vendor insist on for a number of reasons.  Tekelec removes all of this pain by sitting in the middle and playing quarterback, i.e. doing all of the necessary session and management control and even better, reducing capex and opex by increasing headroom on deployed equipment.  Check out there SSR product for more detail.

So, what did surprise me?  The discussion with the CFO.  Tekelec has been rewarded for its relevance in the center of the signaling network, or at least they haven’t been decimated like so many others.   Mr. Everett showed a great chart tracking the stock performance of several telco industry bellweathers for the past year including Acme Packet, Alcatel-Lucent, Sonus, Nortel, Ericsson, etc, etc.  TKLC beat them all, albeit with single digit price growth.  But they did GROW.  They’ve also got the type of balance sheet that affords their customers the sense of comfort that they’ll be around for a while.  This is especially important these days.  Lets see if they can keep it up.