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Posts Tagged ‘Gerbsman Partners’

Here Comes Apple’s Real TV

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Economy, tagged , , , , , , on September 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

By Ben Kunz

A bold, new Apple TV set would replace today’s cable systems, game consoles, and 3D goggles—and launch a war with cable providers.

Get ready, America, because by Christmas 2012 you will have an Apple TV in your living room. I don’t mean the cute little box now called “Apple TV” that plugs into your set to stream Netflix (NFLX), but the real deal—a flat-panel Apple (AAPL) television set tied to the company’s online ecosystem and designed as only Apple can do it.

There’s a $14 billion rationale for this prediction but first, let’s explore the rumors. This summer Piper Jaffray (PJC) analyst Gene Munster dug through component suppliers and found evidence that Apple is gearing up to produce a real TV set by late 2012. Venture capitalist Stewart Alsop, a former board member at TiVo (TIVO), has published rumors that Apple has a television coming. And Steve Jobs himself hinted last year that Apple might build a real television unit.

“The television industry … pretty much undermines innovation in the sector,” Jobs said at the All Things Digital Conference in July 2010. “The only way this is going to change is if you start from scratch, tear up the box, redesign, and get it to the consumer in a way that they want to buy it.”
Jobs’s quote is good advice for his successor as chief executive officer, Tim Cook, who needs a hit. The TV industry is changing more than at any time in the past 50 years, and billions of dollars are going into play for the winners. As Apple crests in the phone and tablet markets, its investors will want a new frontier.

TV is the future because it remains king of all media. While handsets get hyped, the typical U.S. consumer watches 5 hours and 9 minutes of TV a day, according to Nielsen (NLSN), and even younger adults 18 to 24 years old—the supposed digital generation—view 3 hours and 30 minutes on televisions daily, vs. only 49 minutes on the Web and 20 minutes on mobile. We all love to lean back. With so much of the consumer’s time, TV has become bloated with waste. The average U.S. home receives 130 cable channels but “tunes to”—or punches in the exact channel number on the remote—just 18 channels a year. Channel surfing has died. A whopping 86% of available channels are never used by an individual viewer.
Lots of Disenchanted TV Subscribers

Consumers pay a lot for all this video waste and they don’t like it. The average cable bill is $75 per month, which means that each year 83 million households pay $74 billion to the top eight TV-subscription services. This is why so-called “cord cutting,” by which consumers drop cable to watch videos on Roku, Hulu, or the Xbox 360 from Microsoft is (MSFT) accelerating; Comcast (CMCSA), the leading U.S. cable system, lost 238,000 subscribers in the second quarter. If Apple were to offer a better service, people might pay up for it.

A second lure for Apple is TV advertising. Unlike U.S. mobile-ad spending, which EMarketer says will barely break $1 billion in 2010 despite years of hype, the TV ad spend in the U.S. totaled $70 billion in 2010 and is forecast by Forrester Research (FORR) to reach $84 billion by 2015. If Apple could gain just 10% of the $74 billion in current video subscription fees and $70 billion in television ad media, it would take in more than $14 billion in additional annual, recurring revenue.

Apple faces plenty of hurdles. For one thing, TV sets are an infrequent purchase. Apple likes to sell products with built-in obsolescence that you “need” to replace every 18 months—iPhone 5, anyone?—and a flashy TV set doesn’t call for an aluminum upgrade next year. Apple also has struggled to get content providers to embrace its current Apple TV box. In August, Apple stopped renting TV shows for 99¢ on the gadget, claiming that consumers overwhelmingly prefer to buy TV shows. But it could be that Apple’s media partners considered 99¢ far too cheap. With billions of dollars at stake, media producers and cable giants will fiercely defend their video-distribution modes.

Apple noted this risk in its 2010 annual report, in which it said it “relies on third party digital content, which may not be available to the Company on commercially reasonable terms or at all.” Bear in mind that the record labels were losing to digital pirates when Apple’s iTunes came along to save them; the video giants have no similar motive to play along now.

TV as Bold as the IPhone

That’s not an insurmountable obstacle. Apple has some $76 billion in cash and a history of entering unexpected partnerships. AT&T (T) and Verizon helping to sell iPhones? Who’d have thought? The biggest fight may be with new video competitors that are emerging everywhere. Netflix has embedded itself in scores of hardware devices, including TV sets and the Wii from Sony (SNE). Google (GOOG) also has a TV service and its acquisition of Motorola shows that it also wants to own related hardware devices. To win the living room, Apple will need an innovation comparable to that of its iPhone—something that changes TV sets in a fundamental way.

What about 3D? In 2010, Apple won a patent for a revolutionary new 3D screen system that would not require glasses and could be viewed by multiple people at the same time. The patent went so far as to slam current 3D systems, noting that most people dislike goggles and dismissing current non-glasses systems as “essentially unworkable for projecting a 3D image … to an entire audience.”

What solution did Apple propose? An “unobstructed 3D viewing device” that would give each viewer a different line of sight for both left and right eye, perfecting a stereoscopic image for a group of viewers watching one giant screen. The Apple patent even had a cool name for the result: a hologram. Could Apple put holograms in every home, break the stranglehold of cable companies, and unlock a $14 billion TV revenue stream? It’s an audacious and perhaps crazy idea.

Tim Cook, I like the way you think.”

Ben Kunz is director of strategic planning at Mediassociates, a media planning and Internet strategy firm. He is author of the advertising strategy blog ThoughtGadgets.com.

 

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U.S. Facebook users clock in 53.5 billion mins.

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Economy, FaceBook, internet, LinkedIn, Market research, Social Networks, Twitter, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 14, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from SFGate.

“Here’s a mind-numbing stat: Americans spent a total of 53.5 billion minutes on Facebook in May, according to a new Nielsen study released Monday.

In fact, the media-measurement firm’s new report on social networking found that Americans spent more time on Facebook than on any other website – and it wasn’t even close. Yahoo was second with 17.2 billion minutes in May and Google ranked third at 12.5 billion minutes.

With Americans now spending nearly one-quarter of their overall Internet time on social networks and blogs, Nielsen said the results show “how powerful this influence is on consumer behavior, both online and off.”

“Whether it’s a brand icon inviting consumers to connect with a company on LinkedIn, a news ticker promoting an anchor’s Twitter handle or an advertisement asking a consumer to ‘Like’ a product on Facebook, people are constantly being driven to social media,” said Nielsen’s first-ever State of the Media report to focus on social networking.

The report took a snapshot of online activity during May and found nearly 4 of every 5 active U.S. Internet users went to social-networking and blogging sites, accounting for 22.5 percent of the total amount of minutes people spent online. Online gaming was next with 9.8 percent, followed by e-mail at 7.6 percent.

In the social-networking and blogging category, Palo Alto’s Facebook was the runaway leader with 140 million unique visitors during the month, with Google’s Blogger blogging platform a distant second with 50 million unique visitors spending about 723 million minutes.

But the up-and-coming blogging platform Tumblr was third with 623 million minutes, edging out both San Francisco microblogging service Twitter Inc. with 565 million minutes and the professional social network LinkedIn Corp. of Mountain View, which had 325 million. Nielsen said New York’s Tumblr Inc. has nearly tripled its audience since May 2010 and is now “an emerging player in social media.”

Also, the report said 70 percent of all adult social-network users shop online. But 60 percent of social-network denizens create reviews of products or services, making them more likely to be influential for online and offline purchases.

And compared with average Internet users, social networkers are 26 percent more likely to post their political opinions, 33 percent more likely to say what they like or don’t like on television and 75 percent more likely to spend heavily on music.

Other Nielsen findings include:

— The profile of the most active social-network user is of a woman of Asian/Pacific Islander descent between the ages of 18 and 34. The majority of social-network users are women, but men are more likely to visit LinkedIn.

— About 31 million people watched nearly 157 video streams on social networks or blogs in May. More women than men watched video this way, but men spent 9 percent more time watching those streams.

— While almost all social-media users access their networks by computer, a growing segment – about 37 percent – now do so with their mobile phones. More than twice the number of Internet users age 55 and older accessed social media on their phones than a year ago.”

Read more here.

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Twitter’s active flock reaches 100 million

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, FaceBook, internet, Market research, Social Networks, Strategy, Twitter, Web 2.0, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 12, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from SFGate.

“Twitter use is growing, with more than 100 million monthly active users around the world and 50 million who log on every day, the San Francisco microblogging service said Thursday.

Chief executive officer Dick Costolo said the number of active users increased 82 percent since the beginning of this year, putting the company on pace to add as many active users by the end of 2011 as the combined 26 million that Twitter added from 2006 to 2009.

The increasing audience size is key to the company’s future because Twitter is now convinced advertising is “the horse they are going to ride” to generate revenue, said analyst Debra Aho Williamson, principal social media analyst for the research firm

“These are all positive trends,” Williamson said. “2011 has been a good year for Twitter in terms of getting more usage, not just awareness.”

Costolo revealed the new data during an informal “state of the union” briefing with reporters Thursday. Williamson was also prebriefed by Costolo on Wednesday.

Twitter has previously said it had more than 200 million registered accounts worldwide. But Twitter watchers had long questioned how many were multiple accounts registered by the same person and how many accounts were actually active.

So Twitter is now focusing attention on its active users, not just the overall base. Facebook uses the same strategy, touting its 750 million users who log on at least once a month.

The number of active users “can be a successful measure of the exchange of information that’s going on there,” Williamson said.

Many press releases

Still, Williamson said many of Twitter accounts are used by “corporations pumping out press releases, using it as a distribution service.” And she notes that media companies like CNN and The Chronicle have multiple Twitter accounts to distribute news headlines and story links.

“While it sounds relatively good that half of active users log in every day, I wonder what percentage of those active users are just entities putting stuff out and not people actively engaging,” she said.

According to Twitter, the data shows:

— An average 230 million tweets per day, up 110 percent from January.

— More than 5 billion tweets per month

— A 105 percent increase in the number of users who log on each day.

— More than 400 million monthly unique visitors to Twitter.com, up 70 percent from January.

— 55 percent are mobile users.

Twitter now has more than 50 percent of National Football League players, 75 percent of National Basketball Association players, 82 percent of members of Congress, 85 percent of U.S. senators, 87 percent of Billboard Top 100 musicians, 93 percent of Food Network chefs and all of the Nielsen top 50 TV shows.

But there’s one potentially negative statistic that sticks out – a huge portion of active users, 40 percent, have not tweeted in the past month.

“If you think of it as a social network, then 40 out of every 100 aren’t even being very social,” Williamson said.

Still, the overall numbers should be large enough to entice advertisers.

Maybe it’s not as big as Facebook, but “if you look at it from an advertising perspective, an audience is an audience,” Williamson said. “Twitter is really proving itself in terms of getting people engaged with the advertising.”

Ad revenue projections

Twitter hasn’t been successful generating revenue by licensing access to its extensive stream of tweets. Microsoft on Wednesday renewed a deal to license Twitter’s data “fire hose,” but Google has not.

Williamson said the company is continuing to learn from its Promoted Tweets advertising platform and has other programs in the pipeline, including a self-service advertising system.

Twitter is still a privately held company, but eMarketer has projected the firm will have $150 million in advertising revenue this year and $250 million next year. Williamson said she is examining how the newest data may change those projections.

“Twitter had a good year and they clearly have a lot of things planned throughout the rest of the year and in 2012,” Williamson said. “They’re hoping the growth trends will continue.””

Read more here.

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Pew: More Than A Quarter Of U.S. Adults Use Mobile And Social Location-Based Services

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 6, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from Techcrunch.

“There’s no doubt that as smartphone usage increases, geo-location is becoming an increasingly important technology in consumers’ day to day lives. The Pew Internet Research Project has come out with a new report showing the growing number of U.S. adults that are leveraging location-based technologies in social and mobile apps. According to Pew, 28% of adults use at least one of location-based service that exist in mobile and social media spaces. The report shows the most popular use case of location-based technology is using mobile phones for maps, directions, or recommendations.

Pew reports that 28% of cell owners use phones to get directions or recommendations based on their current location (that works out to 23% of all U.S. adults). Only 5 percent of cell phone owners user their phone to check-in to locations using apps like Foursquare or Gowalla.

And 9% of internet users incorporate their location into Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn (7% of all adults). And 28% of U.S. adults do at least one of these activities either on a computer or using their mobile phones.

Unsurprisingly, smartphone owners are more likely to use location-based social networks on their phones. One in ten smartphone owners (12%) have used Foursquare, Gowalla, or a similar application and 55% of smartphone owners have used a location-based information service. Almost six in ten smartphone owners (58%) use at least one of these services.

Pew says that younger smartphone owners are more likely to use location-based services in their phone. And Pew says that geosocial services and automatic location-tagging are most popular with minorities. A quarter (25%) of Latino smartphone owners using geosocial services and almost a third (31%) of Latino social media users enabling automatic location-tagging. Pew says that only 7% of white smartphone owners use geosocial services, byt 59% get location-based information on their phones, compared with 53% of blacks and only 44% of Hispanics.

Pew reported nearly a year ago that only 4% of online American adults use location-based services. My guess is that number has increased since last Novemeber.”

Read more here.

 

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Facebook music rumors revived as BandPage startup gets cash

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Economy, FaceBook, Gerbsman Partners, internet, Investments, Market research, Social Networks, Strategy, Technology, Web 2.0, web 3.0, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 1, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from SFGate.

“RootMusic, a San Francisco startup that helps artists such as Rihanna, Katy Perry and Arcade Fire connect with their Facebook fans, received additional venture funding Wednesday amid reports that the social-networking giant is close to offering its own music service.

RootMusic, which says it has about 32 million monthly active users for its BandPage platform on Facebook, announced a $16 million round of financing led by GCV Capital.

The platform adds a page for fans to hear and share songs, watch video and view concert dates. The company was started in March 2010, but already more than 250,000 bands around the world use BandPage, and usage has increased tenfold since January, said RootMusic CEO J Sider.

There have been various reports that Facebook is ready to release its own music service. On Tuesday, CNBC, Mashable and other outlets reported that Facebook plans to announce a music platform at its f8 developer conference in San Francisco on Sept. 22, with Spotify, MOG and Rdio as partners.

Facebook spokesman Larry Yu would not comment directly on those reports or what’s coming for f8, but said in a statement that “many of the most popular music services around the world are integrated with Facebook and we’re constantly talking to our partners about ways to improve these integrations.”

Sider said he views a potential Facebook music platform as complementary to BandPage.

“If something like this would happen, it would raise awareness that as a fan, (Facebook’s) where I should go first to find information.”

The Facebook music drumbeat might prove to be sour notes for former social-networking rival Myspace, which has been trying to reposition itself as a destination for music. Indeed, RootMusic’s slogan entices musicians to “Make the Move to BandPage on Facebook.”

Read more here.

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