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Tag: market-data

  • Mobile Navigation Users Increased 57% in H1-2010 to 44 million

    According to a new research report from the analyst firm Berg Insight, the number of mobile subscribers using a turn-by-turn navigation service or application on their handset grew 57 percent from H1-2009 to H1-2010 and reached 44 million worldwide.

    The subscriber base is forecasted to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 33.1 percent to reach 195 million users worldwide in 2015.

    Broad availability of GPS handsets and attractive pricing are key factors for widespread adoption of mobile navigation services. In the US, where GPS handset penetration is above 70 percent, navigation services for mobile phones has already reached about 8 percent of the total mobile subscriber base. A large share of these users gets navigation as part of a service bundle together with a voice and data plan from their mobile operator.

    As a response to the launch of free navigation applications for smartphones by Nokia and Google, more and more operators worldwide are now introducing bundled navigation services to offset the cost for end users. Navigation service providers and mobile operators are also trying to monetise services by introducing various feature and content up-sells that allow users to customise navigation applications to suit their personal needs.

    “Mobile operators and service providers are now accelerating their efforts to create differentiated navigation experiences with unique local content to compete against free services”, said André Malm, Senior Analyst, Berg Insight.

    He added that integration of navigation services with other applications to stimulate usage will become increasingly important for mobile operators that seek additional revenues from location-based advertising. Since relatively few subscribers need turn-by-turn guidance on a daily basis, complementary features such as social networking, restaurant and event guides improve stickiness.

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  • Seagate Announces Interest Regarding A Going Private Transaction

    Seagate has announced that it has received a preliminary indication of interest regarding a going private transaction. The company is in discussions with the party from whom it received the indication of interest, and its board of directors is evaluating the indication of interest and other strategic alternatives.

    The company has retained Morgan Stanley & Co. Incorporated and Perella Weinberg Partners LP to provide financial advice and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and Arthur Cox as legal counsel.

    Seagate said that there is no assurance that the company will receive a formal offer or that any transaction will take place.

    According to a report by Reuters, last month, TPG Capital LP and Silver Lake held early stage talks about buying Seagate, but it then appeared unlikely to result in a deal, a source familiar with the situation said at the time.

    Seagate also said that neither the company nor its representatives will be providing any additional comments regarding the preliminary indication of interest.

  • 3D TV Not Growing as Fast as TV Makers Expected in 2010

    3D TV is now readily available in retail, but the uptake among consumers has been limited by high prices and lack of content. However, with falling prices, increased content availability, and improvements in technology all expected, there will be tremendous growth in 3D TV shipments over the next few years.

    DisplaySearch forecasts that 3.2 million 3D TVs will be shipped in 2010, with growth to over 90 million in 2014. Based on this forecast, 3D will grow from 2% of all flat panel TVs shipped in 2010, to 41% in 2014.

    “While TV manufacturers have bold plans and a lot of new products, consumers remain cautious,” said Paul Gray, Director of TV Electronics Research. “Consumers have been told that 3D TV is the future, but there still remains a huge price jump and little 3D content to watch.”

    “North American consumers in particular appear to be playing a waiting game,” noted Paul Gagnon, Director of North America TV Research. “Set makers have trained consumers to expect rapid price falls for new technology, and consumers seem happy to wait a little.” As a result, DisplaySearch forecasts that 3D shipments in North America will be just under 1.6 million this year.

    The Quarterly TV Design and Features Report results also found that sales of 3D glasses in Western Europe remain low, with most countries failing to achieve 1:1 sales of glasses to sets.

    “This is particularly disappointing,” noted Gray, “A healthy level would be closer to two pairs of 3D glasses per TV, so it’s clear that these sets at best are being chosen for future-proofing, and at worst it’s an indication that consumers cannot buy a premium set without 3D.”

    Nevertheless, 3D is a feature that set makers are determined to develop. 3D product choice is expanding fast with increased product launch plans and more set makers adding 3D. Rapidly expanding product offerings and 3D TV set prices have led DisplaySearch to increase its forecast for 3D in later years, with an anticipated 90 million sets being shipped in 2014.

    “TV manufacturers strongly believe in 3D and are driving its cost downward, but its value to consumers relies strongly on the availability of quality material to watch,” Gray concluded.

  • Gartner: The Use of Mobile Fraud Detection in Mobile Commerce Environments is Imperative

    By year-end 2013, location information or profile information from mobile phones will be used to validate 90 percent of mobile transactions, according to Gartner.

    The research firm says that the rapid adoption of smartphones is forcing banks, social networks and other e-commerce providers to implement the kinds of fraud detection capabilities that have become mainstream with fixed-line computing.

    "Because of the improving browser experiences on smartphones, mobile commerce and transaction execution are set to increase rapidly," said William Clark, research vice president at Gartner. "We estimate that by the end of 2013, 12.5 percent of all e-commerce transactions will be mobile."

    "Enterprise applications must detect fraud in these mobile environments, but fraud detection tools available today that work in fixed-line computing environments don’t work well or at all in the mobile world," Clark said.

    "There are a number of methods that can be implemented to help enterprises detect fraud in the mobile space, but they are still in their early stages of development, and it will take until at least 2012 for them to transform from embryonic applications to technically mature systems that work easily and transparently across disparate mobile networks," he added.

    According to Gartner, fraud prevention methods available today to mobile applications include:

    Mobile device identification — This is enabled through a JavaScript on the server that the user logs in to, which captures whatever information it can get from the user’s browser and phone, depending on whether the user is using a browser or native application. If the application is browser-based, then the JavaScript application captures whatever information it can get from the user’s browser to uniquely identify that particular user’s browser and mobile device. If the mobile application is native and residing on the mobile handset, native applications can additionally gather the phone’s serial number and network card number. This will require opt-in by the user.

    Location of device — This is based on the phone’s location information independent of the browser (IP address), so the user does not have to have his or her mobile browser application open for this to work; the phone only needs to be turned on. Enterprises may want to check and correlate the location of the device relative to anything else they know about the user’s location through other systems they may interact with at the enterprise. For mobile phones, there are two architectures that are used to obtain location information: One relies on device information (e.g., using the GPS-API applications that the user must opt into); the other employs APIs provided through mobile network operators that don’t require the users to opt in to releasing this information.

    Some online fraud detection vendors are starting to tune their risk scoring and/or rule-based models specifically for mobile applications — For example, some vendors are looking at the mobile device itself, the location of the phone, and the behavior of the user inside the host application while transacting from the phone. This area is very new to the fraud detection vendors, as there is little mobile transaction experience to draw on in order to build effective risk models and scores that significantly improve on risk models that have already been built for fixed-line computing. It tries to combine some of the methods listed above, including mobile device identification and examining the location of the mobile phone in relation to other information known about the user and his/her location.

    Gartner estimates that 70 percent of the largest 20 global card issuers (who authorize more than 50 percent of all payment card transactions) will gradually adopt mobile context information to help detect fraud on fixed-line transactions, and that by year-end 2015, more than 15 percent of all payment card transactions will be validated using context-aware profile information.

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  • Survey: 79% of Consumers Have Experienced Poor Voice Quality

    According to a recent survey undertaken by the Customer Experience Foundation (CEF) on behalf of Empirix, 79 percent of consumers have experienced poor voice quality.

    The study asked 3,925 consumers about their experiences in dealing with contact centers and identified technology related trends and common problems that are affecting customer service and costing organizations around the world billions of dollars.

    The high percentage of global consumers that highlighted poor voice quality as a common problem points to a real issue in the industry. The study also revealed that poor voice quality drives down sales volumes, increases call lengths and the number of calls that are forced to be redialed. As a result, churn rates can increase for both customers and staff. The magnitude of the problem is indicative of how much businesses are struggling to come to terms with this issue, while consumers are quickly losing patience.

    "The word most associated in the study by consumers with poor voice quality was stress, which is not a word organizations want associated with their customers’ experiences," said Tim Moynihan, vice president of marketing, Enterprise business unit, Empirix.

    "Nearly half of the consumers who commented also felt that poor voice quality was a sign that companies really didn’t value their business-at a time when ensuring customer loyalty is more important than ever in any industry. When you analyze the problems with the core issue of poor voice quality, it equates to costing the industry billions of dollars, directly impacting the bottom line of organizations across the globe," he said.

    Other key survey findings include:
    ● Consumers say that 42 percent of all call center calls are impacted by poor voice quality.
    ● Thirty percent of consumers who experienced poor voice quality said it happened in more than half of their calls, with 68 percent of those saying they would usually hang up as a result, and if they were calling about a new product or service, they would call a competing company instead.
    ● Twenty-six percent of consumers say they need to redial to complete a transaction.
    ● Only one in six companies said they used specialist tools to manage voice quality, so it is no surprise that 72 percent of the businesses polled said they had frequent voice quality issues for which they could not identify the root causes.
    ● "Stress" is the most commonly used word when consumers were asked to explain how they felt after a poor voice quality call was completed.
    ● Case studies show that consumers are often forced to repeat themselves on calls as a result of poor voice quality.

    "Consumers are quickly losing patience with companies that suffer from poor voice quality-truth is, it’s a consumer’s market; they have choices in today’s market," said Professor Morris Pentel, chairman at Customer Experience Foundation.

    "Consumers are having major issues that they will not tolerate, which has obvious ramifications for businesses. Customer and agent churn will increase if they are unable to communicate with each other, not to mention the loss of new business opportunities, such as upsells or new products and offerings. Organizations with a reputation for poor customer service are simply pushing their customers toward their competitors, which impacts market share and the bottom line."

    The survey had more than 5,140 responses online and by telephone, which came from call center and IT Professionals in the U.S., UK, France and Germany, as well as 3,925 consumers.

  • Urgent Requirement for £1billion Upgrade to Britain’s Data Centres

    UK data centres are facing a ‘data crunch’ unless more than £1billion is invested in this critical IT infrastructure over the next 12 months according to Alex Rabbetts, Managing Director of data centre specialists, Migration Solutions.

    Recent unparalleled growth in online services, cloud computing, lean organisation initiatives and the rise of data on mobile phones is seriously risking a melt down in available data centre capacity to the UK.

    “Like the credit crunch, there’s an international dimension to this problem," says Rabbetts. “Worldwide the amount of digital information created last year was 800 billion gigabytes. This year it will grow by a factor of 67 – that’s over a Zettabyte! Simultaneously, the economic downturn has led to a prolonged under-investment in data centre infrastructure at a time when demand is soaring.”

    In the public sector the Cabinet Office has published an IT strategy calling for the G-Cloud, a massive consolidation of the 130 government data centres into 12 super-centres. In the private sector similar initiatives are under way to save money by consolidating and sharing data centre infrastructure.

    Rabbett’s says: “I’m pro modernisation – new, well designed data centres are much more efficient, consume much less power and are better for the environment than legacy solutions. However, in the rush to modernise the UK data centre industry, we have to ensure that we maintain the overall volume of capacity we need today and will inevitably need tomorrow.”

    Migration Solutions calculates that £1billion of new investment in UK data stock will provide 216 Petabytes of additional capacity – that’s just enough to accommodate less than 10% of Google’s Gmail users; or less than 1% of all the video stored on YouTube.

    Alex Rabbetts will be presenting ‘Data Centre 2.0: Managing the Data Crunch and the Power Surge’ at the 360° IT Infrastructure Event in London on 22-23 Sept.

  • Smartphone and Tablet Sales Ignite Advanced LCD Market in 2010

    Rapidly rising sales of smartphones and tablet PCs in 2010 will cause the global market for small- and medium-sized TFT LCD panels to expand at its fastest pace in three years, according to iSuppli.

    In its latest report, the market research firm finds that global shipments of small/medium TFT LCD panels, which are advanced types of displays used in sophisticated mobile devices like smartphones and tablet PCs, are set to rise by 28.1 percent in 2010 to reach 2.3 billion units, up 28.1 percent from 1.8 billion in 2009. This will represent the highest level of growth for the market since 2007, when shipments rose by 49.8 percent.

    “Sales of smartphones and tablets are booming in 2010 courtesy of the iPhone, the iPad and a range of competing products. Because such devices focus on delivering a high-quality user experience, many are employing TFT-LCD displays that offer bright, sharp images—a move that represents a boon for the suppliers of these displays,” said Vinita Jakhanwal, director of small and medium-sized displays at iSuppli.

    Global smartphone shipments are set to rise by 35.5 percent in 2010, according to iSuppli. Meanwhile, tablet PC shipments will grow by a stunning 787.3 percent, driven almost entirely by Apple’s iPad.

    Inspired by the iPhone 4, smartphone makers are adopting TFT LCDs using In-Plane Switching (IPS) technology. IPS supports a wider viewing angle and better picture quality in terms of presentation of color than a conventional LCD. It also consumes less electricity.

    Jakhanval said that all TFT-LCD suppliers now are making alliances or developing their own technology so that they can offer IPS displays to their smart phone and tablet customers.

    Meanwhile, a competing advanced display technology known as the Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode (AMOLED) also is experiencing rapid growth in the small/medium display market, iSuppli’s electronic display research indicates. AMOLEDs are expanding because of the rise of the Android smart phone market.

    Growth in TFT LCD shipments will slow in 2011 and beyond as the expansion of the smart phone and tablet markets cools to more normal levels.

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  • Slow Television Sales Spur LCD Panel Oversupply

    Shipments of large-sized LCD panels vastly exceeded end-market sales of televisions, monitors and notebook PCs in the first half, spurring a major buildup of inventory of the LCDs and finished products, including LCD-TVs, according to iSuppli.

    The research firm finds that a total of 46.8 million LCD-TV panels shipped in the first quarter of 2010. However, although LCD-TV set shipments equaled only 37.5 million units—an overage of 24.5 percent, iSuppli’s electronic display industry analysis indicates.

    In the second quarter, large-sized LCD-TV panel shipments grew to 52.0 million units, but actual set shipments amounted to only 38.7 million units. This gap of 36.4 percent, higher than anything seen in 2009, has pushed the market to further levels of oversupply, especially in the face of an uncertain outlook in the second half of 2010.

    “Coming amid fears of a slowing economy and the possibility of a double-dip recession, the inventory increases in the LCD TV retail channel are raising concerns throughout the display supply chain—from panel suppliers to contract manufacturers and brands, to retailers,” said Sweta Dash, senior director for LCD research at iSuppli.

    According to iSuppli, inventory levels for both suppliers and buyers have caused a ripple effect on pricing as large-sized LCD panel pricing dropped again in July, taking some panels down to the manufacturing cost level. In August, prices dropped another 4.4 percent because of the continuous inventory adjustment, with a further decline expected in September.

    Some low-priced panels were already reaching the cash cost level—and the oversupply situation is not helping matters, iSuppli indicates. These developments have prompted a series of production cuts by some panel suppliers in order to bring panel supply and demand back to balance.

    Although pricing for the LCD-TV sets themselves surged upward in July in the United States, prices are likely to have declined in August and will do so again in September, as brands and retailers have to become aggressive once again with their promotions in the upcoming months in order to fuel demand, iSuppli believes.

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  • Gartner: Android to Become No. 2 Worldwide Mobile OS in 2010

    The worldwide mobile operating system market will be dominated by Symbian and Android, as the two OSs will account for 59.8 percent of mobile OS sales by 2014, according to Gartner.

    The research firm predicts that Symbian will remain at the top of Gartner’s worldwide OS ranking due to Nokia‘s volume and the push into more mass market price points. However, by the end of the forecast period, the No. 1 spot will be contested with Android, which will be at a very similar share level.

    According to Gartner, communication service providers’ marketing and vendor support for Android-based smartphones will drive the platform to become the second-largest platform, following Symbian, by year-end 2010. This is almost two years earlier than Gartner predicted a year ago.

    "The worldwide mobile OS market is dominated by four players: Symbian, Android, Research In Motion and iOS," said Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner.

    "Launches of updated operating systems — such as Apple iOS 4, BlackBerry OS 6, Symbian 3 and Symbian 4, and Windows Phone 7 — will help maintain strong growth in smartphones in 2H10 and 2011 and spur innovation. However, we believe that market share in the OS space will consolidate around a few key OS providers that have the most support from CSPs and developers and strong brand awareness with consumer and enterprise customers," she said.

    Gartner expects manufacturers such as Samsung to launch many new budget Android devices in 2H10 that will drive Android into mass market segments. Other players, such as Sony Ericsson, LG and Motorola, will follow a similar strategy. This trend should help Android become the top OS in North America by the end of 2010.

    "CSPs and mobile device manufacturers alike will need to revisit their platform strategies and balance the need to pursue platforms with the highest current demand against the need to maintain differentiation with unique devices," Cozza said. "CSPs will likely reduce the number of platforms they offer, to reduce their support costs and clarify their propositions to market."

    Gartner predicts that by 2014, open-source platforms will continue to dominate more than 60 percent of the market for smartphones. Single-source platforms, such as Apple’s iOS and Research In Motion’s OS, will increase in unit terms, but their growth rate will be below market average and not enough to sustain share increase. Windows Phone will be relegated to sixth place behind MeeGo in Gartner’s worldwide OS ranking by 2014.

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  • Storage Software Market Delivers Continued Growth in Q2

    According to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker, the worldwide storage software market experienced continued gains in the Q2 2010 with revenues of nearly $3.0 billion, representing 3.3% growth over the same quarter one year ago, but a 2.3% decrease from the previous quarter.

    "The gains in the storage software market in the second quarter were largely the result of overall growth from some of the large suppliers. The growth for the quarter came from EMC (up 13.3% year over year), IBM (up 10.6%), and NetApp (up 6.0%)," said Laura DuBois, program vice president, Storage Software at IDC.

    "From a segment perspective, growth is coming from spending in four segments of storage software: data protection and recovery (up 4.9% year over year), archiving (up 8.2%), storage management (up 5.8%), and storage infrastructure (up 12.7%)," she added. 

    The storage software revenue growth of 3.3% is in line with worldwide external disk storage systems factory revenues, which posted year-over-year growth of 20.4%, totaling $5.0 billion in the second quarter of 2010.

    Top 5 Vendors, Worldwide Storage Software Revenue, Second Quarter of 2010

    (Revenues are in Millions)