Business Week

Research from consultancy Parks Associates shows that 7% of social networking participants also use services like Skype daily, and a third make Web-based phone calls at least once every few months. "It's a smart play to integrate voice into social networks," says John Barrett, an analyst at Parks Associates. "The social network is kind of the dial tone for the next generation."

From the article "Skype's 'Make-or-Break Year,'" by Olga Kharif

Today, some 60% of all households in Hong Kong watch programming delivered over the Internet to the TV, says researcher Parks Associates. From a hotel in Seoul, I can click to do my banking on TV. A couple of friends I know live on the frozen tundra of Canada; even there, I can play games or get onscreen score alerts of favorite sports teams.

From the article "I Want My iTV," by Cliff Edwards.
  

What's more, wireless service providers can use femtocells to snatch business from landline phone service operators and Web-calling outfits such as Vonage. Already, 19% of Americans have dropped their landlines and rely solely on mobile phones, according to consultancy Parks Associates. Those numbers would probably surge as cellular service in the home improves.

From the article "Home Is Where the Femtocell Is," by Olga Kharif and Bruce Meyerson.
 

Dress up CDs all you want, but you won't be able to reverse the CD sales trend, says Forrester Research (FORR) analyst James McQuivey. "We are very far away from being able to persuade people to go back to CD," he says. John Barrett, director of research at consumer researcher Parks Associates, adds that a limited number of consumers will really take advantage of the added content. "It's all a way to tip the scales in your direction, but there's probably only so many artists that ...read more

The @Home service—which promotes T-Mobile as the only phone service you'll ever need—could further erode the traditional wired phone business. Various estimates suggest that between 27% and 41% of cellular minutes are used during calls from inside the home. And some 19% of U.S. households with Internet service have cut the cord, relying on their cell phones exclusively, according to consultancy Parks Associates. If it proves popular, @Home could speed that conversion, inflicting ...read more

But once you have 100Mbps or more available at home, what the heck are you going to do with all that bandwidth? For the average consumer, 6Mbps should more than suffice for today's typical needs, whether it's downloading music, watching the occasional video, or even running a home network that lets two or three computers do the same all at once. Does anyone really care whether that song download from iTunes (AAPL) takes 10 seconds or 2 seconds?

We've been here before. In 1999, ...read more

We've been here before. In 1999, there were fewer than 2 million people in the U.S. subscribing to either DSL or cable broadband. By the end of 2006, that number exceeded 51 million, says the Dallas consultancy Parks Associates. Meanwhile, prices have come down. In 1999, Bell Atlantic, now part of Verizon, offered consumers a high-end DSL package that topped 1.6Mbps for about $110 a month. Now it's offering 3Mbps for $30 a month.

That trend is going to repeat itself, says Parks ...read more

"If Take-Two and other companies don't diversify genres and their ultimate strategy is to milk the same gamers over and over again, they will run into a corner," said Michael Cai, director of broadband and gaming research at Parks Associates, a Dallas-based market research firm.

From the article "Video game company postpones meeting amid shareholder revolt," by Rachel Konrad