By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is some Frank Sinatra album with “swing,” “dance” or “lovers” in the title –
First CoffeeSM is quite fond of Sinatra’s music, but recognizes he
didn’t have the most creative marketing folks naming his albums, as there’s Swing And Dance With Frank Sinatra, Sing and Dance With Frank Sinatra, Come Dance With Me, Come Fly With Me, Come Swing
With Me, Swing Easy, Songs For Swinging Lovers, Songs For Young Lovers… no Songs For Flying, Swinging, Dancing Lovers
that First CoffeeSM’s aware of.
Not sure about you, but when
First CoffeeSM sees headlines such as today’s “Scientists
Capture Giant Squid On Camera,” well, it’s hard to concentrate on work.
…
First CoffeeSM hasn’t seen this reported on yet,
it came out a few days ago, and it’s the kind of thing that shows how actual
people use technology in real life. More importantly, it shows that Americans are wonderfully different from the
rest of the world, so when it comes to marketing consumer technology, one
size does not fit all.
Global Tech Insight 2005 surveyed 6,800 adults aged 16-49
who own either a mobile phone, PDA or laptop and who access the Internet every
week. The study was conducted in 15 countries between 11th July and 15th August
2005.
The countries included in the study were Australia, Brazil (“metro”
Brazil, or the parts with paved roads), China (metro), France (those not on
vacation or cheering for Lance Armstrong to lose the Tour de France), Germany,
Hong Kong, India (metro), Japan, South Korea, The Netherlands, New Zealand,
Russia (metro), Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States.
“Over 75 percent of mobile phone and PDA users in the United
States rate ‘two-days of battery life
during active use’ as the most important feature of an ideal converged
device of the future,” according to a new study by TNS, a market information
vendor.
Sure, you say. Makes sense to me. Well, this feature is
considered more important to the respondents of only two other countries
included in the study – Sweden and The Netherlands, “indicating,” as the study
says, “the value that American technology users place on battery life.”
Doesn’t that tell you something about Americans as opposed
to Europeans? Sure it does, it shows Americans are on the go, in cars and away
from electrical outlets a whole lot more than Europeans are. Tech in real life.
The study wanted to find out what consumers
want in future mobile devices, as well as benchmarking brand performance
and use of existing mobile phone, PDA and laptop applications. One section of
the study looked at consumer views on “converged devices,” something to replace
the multiple devices which people carry around now for “all communication,
information and entertainment needs.”
Oh, and it needs to be compact, have a mobile phone and
high-speed Internet. Standard.
According to the study, after battery life the next most
important features to U.S. users were high resolution camera and video camera,
the availability of full versions of Microsoft Office applications on the
device, and a device with 20 Gigabytes of memory.
“Two days of battery life during active use” was important
to 14 of the 15 countries surveyed as well – China put “20 Gigabytes of memory”
as their most important feature – but not quite to the extent it is in America.
Concern with using up the battery is one of the top reasons
why consumers do not use games, music and TV applications on their mobile
device more frequently.
In Brazil, a much higher emphasis was placed on video
conferencing, with 53 percent of people identifying this as a key feature,
compared to an average of just 25 percent across all countries surveyed. Now
what does that tell you about ease and cost of travel in those countries?
The report shows that MMS is “now fairly common across the
globe,” with 46 percent of mobile phone users interviewed saying they send
pictures and photos via MMS, and 23 per cent saying they send video or audio
clips through MMS. Sending photos and pictures via MMS is used most among
mobile phone users in Japan (could you have guessed that? First CoffeeSM
could have), France, Korea (the one not run by an insane little nuke-obsessed creep)
and the United Kingdom.
Only 20 percent of U.S. respondents send video or audio clips
through MMS, placing the U.S. among the lowest users of this technology in the
world. What does that say about Americans? That we have more powerful PCs at
home? Only 10 percent of U.S. respondents use their camera phone on a daily
basis, and almost 70 percent of users never use a camera phone at all, and
First CoffeeSM knows from personal experience that this is because
high-quality digital cameras are a lot cheaper in America than they are in a
lot of the other countries surveyed.
Some of the study’s finding simply stand to common sense
reason. Internet telephony is used much more widely among laptop users in
developing compared with developed markets such as Brazil, India and Russia – 44
percent, 30 percent and 22 percent of laptop users respectively use VoIP,
compared to just seven percent in the U.S. and two percent in Japan and the
Netherlands.
Now guess which countries have better infrastructures and
more affordable telecommunications and win the kewpie doll.
...
Yes, First CoffeeSM realizes he has an evil,
wicked, twisted, warped sense of humor, but Mental Drippings’
list of the ten worst album covers of all time is one of the funniest things he’s ever seen online.
...
Here’s a company to watch: Formula Telecom Solutions, Ltd.,
which sells convergent CRM and billing products for mobile, fixed-line, and
advanced services operators, has been named
to the Deloitte Brightman Almagor Israel Technology Fast 50, at #7 among
Israel’s 50 fastest growing technology companies.
Each year, Deloitte lists and ranks 50 of Israel’s fastest
growing technology companies, basing the rankings on companies’ percentage
revenue growth over a five-year period.
...
By the way, we’re all watching the security on our CRM systems,
right? Because Engin
didn’t: “One of its users made a
post on broadband information site Whirlpool revealing how to obtain
details of other customers’ orders over the Web.”
…
ERSVP, a Web-based events developer and MPbid,
an online meetings facilitator are
partnering to offer each other’s products in a package of attendee
management products and services for the meetings and events industry.
Under terms of the agreement, each firm will coordinate
marketing and operations to provide clients with meeting consolidation and
attendee management.
Originating in the early 1990s, the meetings consolidation trend has accelerated
noticeably in recent years to cope with increasing logistical complexity of
meetings and events, demands from corporate management for greater financial
accountability, and new federal regulations, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of
2002.
…
First CoffeeSM’s found that these retail drug
spammers are, for some wonderfully zany reason, inserting odd bits of prose in their spam e-mails.
One example: An e-mail picked at random from someone trying
to sell drugs. After a few lines of sales pitch (“Yell not anymore to stomach
upset”), there’s this:
“Dear me.” says Mr.
Guppy. “Who’s that?”
fozzard foog flxdr n2 ferring filmgreviews “Miss
Ada,” said Mr. Kenge, “this is Miss Summerson.”
She came to meet me
with a smile of welcome and her hand extended, but seemed to change her mind in
a moment and kissed me. In short, she had such a tee, captivating, winning
manner that in a few minutes we were sitting in the window-seat, with the light
of the fire upon us, talking together as dree and happy as could be.
How tee. Surrealism in every day life. We all need it.
Surrealist joke: How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?
Blue.
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/
for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored
content.
