Blog articles from 02/2010

In a recent interview with Light Reading Ericsson's Vice President of Radio products said that femtocells were beaten by WiFi as the technology of choice for data services within the home. Pricing seems to be the key factor inhibiting wide spread adoption of 3G femtocells. In 2008, the goal of major chip set providers and femtocell systems providers was to break the $100 barrier. Chip sets were still considered to be quite expensive to make femtocell attractive as a mass market...

Parks Associates is supporting the Social Networking World Forum to be held March 15-16 at the Olympia Conference Centre in London. This two-day event features four dedicated conference streams: Social Networking World Forum, Enterprise Social Media, Social TV World Forum, and Mobile Social Networking Forum. Tekey speakers from global brands, organizations, social networking publishers and developers, pioneering social media leaders, top agencies, content producers plus many more....

Last summer, I had commented about the uptick in cable broadband-related residential gateway deployments. Cable operators are now starting to look at the residential gateway as a potential path to CAPEX reduction, as they seek to reduce costs on advanced set-top boxes and allow the RG to handle more video-centric functionality. Spanish cable operator ONO is working with Technicolor (formerly Thomson) to deploy RGs. Technicolor announced on Friday that it had deployed 250,000 RGs (the...

Today's Dallas Morning News has a good article about Blockbuster's attempts to move deeper into digital distribution. The company is trying numerous ways to move beyond the traditional retail-oriented DVD and Blu-ray rental model, and the article mentions several initiatives, including: * Mailing DVDs/Blu-ray Discs to customers who can't find the titles on store shelves (and they don't have to sign up for the mail-order service); * The ability to rent or download current releases...

Parks Associates is supporting the U.S.-Japan Clean Tech Symposium 2010: Why Being in Japan and Partnering with Japanese Companies are Essential for Clean Tech on February 18th in San Francisco. This event will highlight clean tech opportunities and encourage collaboration between U.S. and Japanese companies through discussion and sharing of strategies and plans (e.g., investment in U.S. and Japan; innovation opportunities for U.S. and Japanese companies; entry into third-country...

Google’s announcement today that it will build an “experimental” fiber network to offer super fast broadband Internet access of 1 gigabit per second to between 50,000 to 500,000 U.S. households is the stimulus model for economic recovery. Google is investing its own cash surpluses, rather than deficit government funds, to create an information superhighway which will put the U.S. back on pace with Japan, France and other nations that already enjoy much faster Internet access for less...

Parks Associates announced the agenda for CONNECTIONS™ Europe : Monetizing Connectivity and User Experiences, which the international research firm will host on April 27, 2010, in Amsterdam. CONNECTIONS™ Europe is the leading executive summit featuring European and international consumer research, top executives, and innovative companies in the digital living markets. The summit will examine business models and challenges related to digital media, including the potential of...

Digital Media II is a primary consumer survey measuring the adoption and use of existing platforms and gauges the market potential for future platforms including digital cameras, TVs, digital photo frames, and Blu-ray players. Key Topics include the following: - 3D TV - The market potential for "slate" and tablet PCs - Triggers for adoption, usage scenarios, and hardware configuration for emerging platforms - Hardware configurations used for consuming Internet video...