Author: Mike Melanson

If you’re still paying a per-text message fee, we can only figure one of two things. Either you haven’t opened up your phone bill and taken a look at how much you’re being charged compared to a monthly plan, or you’re one of the remaining troglodytes that doesn’t really use text messaging. Either way, you’re about to pay more, and the government couldn’t care less.

An article in the gadget guide Electronista pointed out this morning that a recent investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice is over and the verdict is in.

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Between 2005 to 2008, the number of major cell phone carriers dropped from six to four, and text message prices doubled, going from 10 cents to 20 cents a piece. That is, competition decreased and prices increased – a telltale sign of an industry moving closer to a monopoly.

The four major carriers involved were AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint Nextel and Verizon Wireless.

Wisconsin’s Democratic Senator Herb Kohl and the Senate antitrust subcommittee decided to look into the companies’ practices and urged an investigation. The Justice Department has now declared that investigation over and announced that they will do nothing to stop these companies from charging as much as they please for a service that costs them nearly nothing to provide.

The DOJ said they found no evidence that the companies had worked together in raising text message fees, despite the fact that all increases came within months and even weeks of each other.

Randall Stross of the New York Times shows us in a recent article how the cell phone companies are even making a big profit on customers with monthly plans, comparing users to customers at an all-you-can-eat buffet, and the companies as the cafeteria owners.

Customers with unlimited plans, like diners bringing a healthy appetite to an all-you-can-eat cafeteria, might think they’re getting the best out of the arrangement. But the carriers, unlike the cafeteria owners, can provide unlimited quantities of “food” at virtually no cost to themselves – so long as it is served in bite-sized portions.

So, keep text messaging away and filling the cell phone companies’ coffers – we know we will.

Photo of cell phone by Flickr user Noel A. Tanner.

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By now – the beginning of a new decade and well into the 21st century – it’s a story we’ve long come accustomed to: the music industry is dying a slow, painful, sputtering death at the hands of the Internet.

According to analyst firm Forrester’s latest report, 2009 was “a lousy end to an even lousier decade” for the music industry and we shouldn’t expect much different until at least 2013. Last year, as a matter of fact, was one of the worst years yet, with a 13% decline from the year before.

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For much of the report, the numbers only confirm what we’ve already come to expect over the past decade. Music industry revenues in 2009 were $6.3 billion, less than half what they were in 1999, and people spent 32% less in 2009 on music than they spent in 2008.

Of course the economy can’t be helping these numbers, but Forrester sees this as a trend that is going to continue until it gradually starts to even out in 2013. By 2014, the company predicts music industry revenue to level off at around $5.5 billion with digital sales taking up most, but not all, of the slack.

The report also has one interesting event to note for 2012 and, no, it isn’t the destruction of the world at the hands of a Mayan death clock – digital music sales will finally surpass sales of physical media like CDs and vinyl.

While it goes on to say that 2010 will be a better year than 2009 for the growth rate of spending on digital music, the overall numbers will likely trend downwards after that, as shown in the graph above.

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Whatever Google’s reason for threatening to leave China, the latest numbers from StatCounter, a free online stat service, show that it certainly isn’t for lack of opportunity. Google has been steadily gaining ground on China’s premier search service, Baidu, since last August.

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According to StatCounter, Google held just 28% of China’s search market back in August and since has climbed to nearly 43%. That’s a 15-percentage-point gain in just four or five months. Yahoo and Bing account for just over 1% of China’s search engine market.

While estimates put Google’s projected 2010 income from business in China at around 2% of the company’s entire revenue, the long-term implications of pulling out of the country are much larger.

If any company should just give up the ghost and get out of China before making any more PR (and human rights) gaffes, maybe it’s Yahoo.

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A new report released today by Forrester Research is calling the tech downturn of 2008 and 2009 “unofficially over.”

“Coming out of a lousy 2009, 2010 is looking a lot better,” said Andrew Bartels, the report’s author. “We see 2010 as the first year in a multi-year growth cycle. It’s not a simple rebound from a downturn.”

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The report predicts IT growth in the U.S. to come in around 6.6%, more than twice the growth of the nominal GDP. Bartels said that this growth would be led by two primary factors: “smart computing” and a rebound in mature technologies.

“Investments that were planned to be made were put on the shelf,” he said. “PCs will do very well in 2010 as a rebound.”

As the economic downturn ends, we can expect to see a rebound in mature technologies as repairs and purchases that would have normally been made were put on hold until the economic situation looked more promising. To that end, a large variety of PCs, peripherals and storage devices will make a comeback, the report predicts.

As for “smart computing”, a separate report last December predicted that the technology sector was entering a cycle of tech innovation and growth called “smart computing”. Bartels defines “smart technology” as “a new generation of integrated hardware, software, and network technologies that provide IT systems with real-time awareness of the real world and advanced analytics to help people make more intelligent decisions.” So, basically, it’s many of the innovative applications we look at here at RWW, from location-based iPhone apps to real-time diagnostic software being implemented in hospitals.

Bartel said that businesses will be able to leverage the data provided by new applications and will be able to run more efficiently, a change he said we began to see in late 2007, before the global economic downturn. According to the December report, this new area will promote growth for the next seven or eight years.

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While Google continues to digitize everything from the view from the driver’s seat to the contents of your appointment book, their tremendous attempt at digitizing the written word, Google Books, has run into a snag in the most ironic of places – China. While the country is infamous for copyright infringement, especially of intellectual property, it too is working to prevent the unfair use of its citizen’s copyrighted works.

Bloomberg reported this morning that Google “has agreed to meet demands from a local writers’ group that it stop scanning and uploading books to the company’s online library without authors’ permission.”

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The company found itself in a Chinese court last month facing allegations of copyright infringement by Chinese author Mian Mian, whose book can still be seen in preview on the Google service.

This certainly isn’t the first time Google has run into complaints over its practices with the project. Last month, the company was convicted of violating France’s copyright laws. A Globe and Mail report on Google’s practices stated that over 80% of the French books offered were still under copyright. The company has also faced criticism in Germany over its Google Books service, where today the German minister of Justice warned that the company may be reaching monopoly status, requiring government intervention.

The Bloomberg article notes that in China, Google trails behind the search engineBaidu. This is in a country with more Internet users than the entire population of the United States. But is the problem of supposed copyright infringement a public relations issue in a country where the average consumer sees counterfeit products in nearly every storefront window? While we stand on the side of writers getting paid for their work, we’re not sure this issue would really stand in the way of Google gaining popularity in China.

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As we reported last week, Firefox’s latest version of 3.6 Release Candidate 1, has been released to the general public. Today, however, Mozilla has issued a more general release, as the new version will not only be available for download but also part of an automatic update for those already running Firefox. The release is one more sign that we’re getting closer by the day to a full-on sparkly new version of Firefox.

For those of you worried about updating, Mozilla has assured us that “over 75% of the thousands of Firefox Add-ons have now been upgraded by their authors to be compatible with Firefox 3.6,” so go ahead and take that leap. But what will you find on the other side?

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Firefox 3.6 RC1 Features

In addition to offering this release as an automatic update, Mozilla has offered a synopsis of what it sees as the most important new features to be found in what the company hopes to be a near-final version.

• Users can change the browser’s appearance with a single click using Personas.
• To keep users safe, Firefox 3.6 alerts them about out-of-date plugins .
• Changes how third-party software integrates with Firefox to increase stability.
• Improved automatic form-fill provides better options from your form history.
• Open, native video can now be displayed full screen, and supports poster frames.
• Support for the WOFF font format.
• Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and startup time.
• The ability to run scripts asynchronously to speed up page-load times.
• Support for the HTML5 File API
• Support for new CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies.

While wallpapering Firefox with the latest blockbuster movie may be an attractive addition, we are looking forward to a faster and more stable Firefox. Loading scripts asynchronously should speed up some page-load times dramatically by letting faster scripts run while slower ones continue to do their work in the background – something our computers have been doing for a long time now. And the changes to third-party software integration should offer a huge boost to the browser’s stability by keeping the core components of the browser safe from being modified.

For the Web developers out there, increased support for CSS, DOM and HTML5 is always a welcome addition, and the addition of the WOFF font format may further help page-load times and give designers a greater range of choices.

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When we talk to our less technologically-inclined friends about Twitter, we often run across the objection that they really don’t care what so-and-so ate for lunch today or what movie they are seeing tonight. And every time, we try to extol all the other benefits of the world’s most popular microblogging service. But could we be wrong? Is Twitter mostly people talking about themselves and what they ate for lunch?

Well, SemanticHacker, the blog of contextual ad platform Textwise, has crunched some numbers and we may have to eat our hat.

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Parlez vous Twitterspeak?

The blog used Twitter’s streaming API to gather nearly 9 million tweets from over 2 million individual users. Before looking at the data for meaning, the company first took a look at the language distribution of their sample.

While the SemanticHacker team expressed their surprise at the language distribution, particularly the strong showing of Portuguese, we at ReadWriteWeb couldn’t help but wonder about the 10% labeled as “Unknown/Misclassified.” Are these tweets simply so horribly misspelled that the language-guessing program they used on the data could not venture a guess? Or could it be that 10% of the Twitter populous is now writing in that contracted form of text message Twitter-speak that it could no longer be classified as a recognizable language? (If you’re looking for a good example, find a 12-year-old and exchange text messages or just give Sarah Palin’s Twitter a look.)

What We’re A-Twittering About

The folks at SemanticHacker then took a random sample of 1,000 English-language tweets and broke them down into eight categories.

According to their findings, it seems that Twitter really is full of people talking about themselves. A full 57% of the sample falls into tweets about what a person is doing, or private conversations between individuals.

That leaves just 43% for other purposes, but when we take a look at that, the findings seem to become even more dismal. If we take away another 8% for “Other Messages” and “Unknown,” and another 8% for “Spam” and “Advertising,” we’re left with a mere 27% of the information on Twitter having some sort of value.

Maybe it isn’t as bad as it looks, though. We’re willing to bet that if we wrote down everything we said in a day, the meaningful parts might not even reach the 27% mark.

Oh, did I tell you about the tasty lentils I had for lunch today?

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Yahoo! announced plans today at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to spread its tentacles deeper into the Internet-connected TV market, inking new deals with TV, media player and processor manufacturers, as well as releasing its widget development kit and signing on with new content partners.

When we looked at the rebirth of the Web TV last year, we had one major reservation – would people really buy a new TV just for the widgets? “Probably not,” we said. This year, Yahoo! is bringing the Internet into our other devices, so we don’t have to.

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Yahoo! is stepping it up in the Internet-connected TV game, which is an area we saw boom at last year’s CES. This year we’re seeing much of the same. Skype announced its entrance into the Internet-connected TV market on Tuesday, while Samsung announced today that it will offer the Napster widget on its TVs.

According to the press release, new deals with MIPS, Sigma Designs and ViewSonic will enable Yahoo! Widgets to be embedded not only in Internet-connected TVs, but in a number of other devices, such as media players, “Blu-ray players, network players, AV receivers, and cable/IPTV set-top boxes.” This is a big move because, while we may not want to replace our widescreen TV, we might be in the market for a Blu-ray player.

Today’s announcement also highlighted deals with a number of new content providers, including Showtime, CNBC, Napster, The Weather Channel and more. But do we really need The Weather Channel widget when we can have just The Weather Channel, itself? Maybe. Maybe not. But the company’s release of its widget development kit to the general public might open the doors to some interesting new widgets.

Cory Pforzheimer, a spokesperson for Yahoo!, told us earlier today that keeping the WDK private was an issue of working together with TV manufacturers and software developers.

“TV manufacturers weren’t really used to updating after they sent out their units. There’s no such thing as a beta on a TV,” he said. “The last thing Samsung wants is calls when someone’s Facebook widget doesn’t work.”

The combination of affordability and potential for innovation here could be just enough to bring the Web back to the TV through the side door.

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AT&T has announced a new line of Android-based smartphones for 2010. Dell, HTC and Motorola will make the five new devices, which are scheduled to be released during the first half of 2010.

Endgadget is predicting that AT&T will be using the Motorola Backflip, while Slashgear has confirmed that the Mini 3i will be the choice for Dell. The other three, Endgadget says, will most likely go to HTC.

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The announcement is good for AT&T customers who wanted an Android phone but are held under contract with the company. Up until now, AT&T has offered the iPhone and a variety of Palm and Blackberry devices, but nothing operating the Android OS.

The company made the announcement today at CES where they also announced new initiatives to increase the number of applications available to their customers. To this end, the company is offering a new software developer kit and is looking to sign new distribution deals in order to offer its phone apps worldwide.

Nokia also announced today that its Ovi mobile application store will be available to AT&T customers in the United States.

Full details can be found in the company’s press release.

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Mozilla has made the first release candidate for Firefox 3.6 available for download this morning, following a recent announcement that further releases would be delayed.

Firefox 3.6, codename “Namoroka”, looks to improve startup time and general responsiveness, among other issues.

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For those of us who aren’t in the know about software versioning, as a “release candidate”, Mozilla is hoping this is what Firefox 3.6, without the asterisk, is going to look like.

“Should everything run smoothly during testing this is what will be released to our users as the official version after a beta period,” reads the description on Mozilla’s development wiki.

Downloads are available for Windows, Mac and Linux from Mozilla’s FTP site.

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Nobody puts it in a square box, at least.

Boxee, the software that brings Internet media to your television, has been seen in the flesh at CES today.

We first heard about the Boxee Box in November, but the announcement was light on details. This time around, D-Link offered a list of specifications and media-format compatibilities at the oddly-shaped device’s unveiling.

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According to D-Link’s press release, the device will retail for under $200 and will come embedded with support for a number of web sites, including Netflix, Facebook, Pandora, Twitter and Flickr.

As for media formats, the Boxee Box will handle a majority of file formats, including DiVX, MPEG1 through 4, VOB, Flash, and most standard video and image types. Most notably missing from the mix are GIFs and QuickTime files.

The device comes prepared to handle RSS and XML feeds in order to keep its users up to date.

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Starting this spring, you won’t need to gather the whole family around a 15-inch laptop screen to talk with cousin Joe on the other side of the country. As a matter of fact, you won’t even need to get up off the sofa after the evening news, because Skype is coming to the big screen – the big TV screen, that is.

Skype announced today that they have been working with LG and Panasonic to embed Skype in Internet-connected widescreen HDTVs.

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Skype claims it is listening to its customers who (gasp!) want to get away from their computers once in a while.

“We know that Skype users are increasingly interested in conducting video calls away from their computers,” said Skype CEO Josh Silverman in a press release. “With Skype, consumers […] will now be able to participate in rich, real-time video conversations from the comfort of their couch.”

According to Skype, up to 5 million Skype-enabled TVs will be delivered during 2010, but the TV alone will not do it. In addition to a high-speed connection, users will need to purchase a specially designed web cam, which Skype spokesperson Jennifer Caukin told us would run about $150. Caukin said the web cam is designed to pick up audio from a greater distance, so Skype TV users will be able to remain seated instead of huddling around a microphone. It will also provide high-definition video capabilities.

Skype will be embedded on LG’s NetCast series and Panasonic’s VIERA CAST series of HDTVs.

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Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that BreakingNews.com was opperated by the same people who started the @breakingnews Twitter account.

MSNBC announced this morning that it is buying the BreakingNews.com URL from a company called PV Media Group. This follows November’s purchase of @breakingnews and its 1.4 million followers. The two companies were not connected before MSNBC’s acquisitions of their various projects.

When we profiled @breakingnews founder Michael van Poppel in July, the company was just about to release its iPhone app and had over 800,000 followers on Twitter. That number is now over 1.5 million.

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“Not everyone wants news surrounded by commentary or features,” said Charlie Tillinghast, president of the MSNBC Digital Network in the company’s press release about today’s purchase.

MSNBC Spokesperson Gina Stikes told us in an email that “Msnbc has acquired the URL only.” She did not disclose any further details, such as the purchase price.

For more background about BreakingNews.com, see today’s coverage at DomainNameWire.

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“2009 was the year of Social Media” according to Buzz Study, the blog that keeps tabs on Infegy’s Social Radar. They’re not speaking from experience, they’re speaking from what they’ve seen in the billions of “blog posts, news feeds, forums, social networks and Twitter posts” the service has collected over the past two years.

While the service normally provides more complex information around a certain brand, as in its tracking of the Domino’s Pizza PR disaster this past September, the top 50 list takes an easier approach: how many unique sources mentioned a brand over the past year.

So what brand was the talk of the town in 2009?

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Why, Twitter, of course.

Google, which had previously held the number one spot, took second prize and Facebook jumped up six spots to round out the top three.

While you can take a look at the full list of 50 top brands yourself, Buzz Study had this to say about the results:

The list certainly shows that 2009 was the year of Social Media. Twitter moved ahead of Google to take the number 1 spot, while Facebook and MySpace made significant leaps over big brands as well. Most video game related brands were down this year as well, including Sony, Wii, Xbox, and Nintendo. It also appears TV brands all jumped this year including Disney, MTV, Fox, BBC, CNN, ESPN, and ABC.

Blackberry, MTV and Starbucks were among the top movers in this years list, with each rising 17, 13 and 12 spots respectively. Canon, Samsung and Intel were the hardest hid on the list, dropping 17, 16 and 13 spots from last year.

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The graying of the Facebook population seems to have continued according to new stats released today by iStrategyLabs. And while one might expect more of the site’s now nearly 10 million users over the age of 55 to be Neil Young fans, his “Rock N’ Roll Will Never Die” refrain seems to be falling through. The listing of the term “rock and roll” as an interest is down over 60% among Facebook users in the past year.

The statistics released today pertain to the 100 million U.S.-based Facebook users, which comprise nearly one-third of the site’s entire user base. They seem to support a continuing trend for Facebook – the slow growth of young and marketable users joining the site compared with their elders. We took a look at the numbers six months ago and most of the indicators seem to be only growing stronger.

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Now, a big number to look at before anything else is Facebook’s nearly 145% growth in the past year, going from 40 million to over 100 million users since January last year. But where is this growth coming from?

When we last wrote about the graying Facebook population in July, users in the 55-plus demographic had skyrocketed from 1 million to nearly 6 million. This same population has now grown to nearly 10 million, a growth of 922% over the past year. This makes this age group now account for one of every 35 Facebook users. Is the boom in Baby Boomers a problem for Facebook or does it just open up new markets?

It seems that the numbers for users identifying as high school or college students have returned to positive growth, and the overall demographics of the site have remained steady. Despite the explosion of senior netizens on the site, the 55-plus group still make up only 9% of the site’s entire user population, just 1% more than the last time we looked.

While the over-55 group has strong numbers, the other demographic groups are still primarily responsible for the site’s exponential growth, each increasing by nearly 10 million users over the past six months.

Instead of seeing this as a problem for Facebook, maybe it’s just a sign that the site is no longer popular just among teenyboppers and cool college kids. And maybe, just maybe – if we can all figure out the privacy settings – we can all coexist without our parents and grandparents ruining the party.

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A year-end thank-you note from Hulu CEO Jason Kilar offered some statistics to show us just how much the nearly three-year-old service has grown.

Back in April, the service became one of the top three Internet video providers, alongside Google – which includes YouTube and Google Video – and Fox, according to comScore. Kilar includes a number of statistics in his note to show that the site has continued its climb in popularity during the rest of 2009.

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“Monthly users of Hulu, as measured by comScore, grew to over 43 million, a 95 percent increase over this time last year.

Monthly streams, as measured by comScore, grew to 924 million, a 307 percent increase from this time last year.

Hulu’s content library doubled over the past year. We now offer over 14,000 hours of premium content, up from 5,600 hours at this time last year.”

The addition of Disney as a content partner last April surely provided a traffic boost, as the ABC owner brought television sensations like “Lost”, “Grey’s Anatomy” and other prime-time hits to the site.

A live video of Obama’s inauguration topped the list of embedded videos for 2009, while “Saturday Night Live”, “Family Guy”, “The Office”, “The Simpsons” and “Naruto Shippuden” were the most popular shows of the year.

But what was the overall winner for 2009 on Hulu, you might be wondering? A decidedly NSFW SNL short called “Motherlover”.

For those of you who still haven’t made the digital television switch but still want to watch, Hulu will be streaming the ball drop in Times Square tonight starting at 10 pm EST.

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Firefox hit a new milestone today, as version 3.5 overtook Internet Explorer 7.0 with nearly 22% of the browser market, according to statistics from web analytics service StatCounter. This comes on the heels of statistics we saw earlier this month, which showed Firefox overtaking IE for overall usage in Germany.

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While IE still dominates the browser market – with 55% of people using some version – all combined versions of Firefox occupy 32% and have been steadily gaining ground. Released at the end of June, version 3.5 of Firefox has quickly climbed the charts. IE 8, on the other hand – which was first released in beta more than a year earlier, with a full release in March 2009 – now holds a similar 20% of the market to that of Firefox 3.5’s 22%.

It would seem that a majority of Firefox 3.5 users were already using 3.0 and upgraded, as the 20% drop in 3.0 use almost directly correlates to the 22% increase in 3.5.

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