Blog articles from 02/2014

Recent announcements and research findings confirm that automated, or programmatic, media buying and selling will soon be the standard way ad dollars are exchanged. Buyers are quickly realizing the benefits such cost efficiencies, reduced ad waste, scalable reach, transparency, and control, and are quickly changing the way they process their ad spend-moving away from traditional ad management platforms to automated, real-time markets. The ability to cherry pick the placement of...

Parks Associates has released a new consumer analytics report on consumer interest in and adoption levels of home energy management features. The market focus report, " Consumer Segmentation: Who Will Pay for Home Energy Management? " analyzes the overall appeal of different types of smart home features, providing key insights into the top five features consumers identify as most important. 11% of U.S. broadband households already own and use a programmable,...

While the Android-based Nokia X smartphone stole the attention at MWC, everyone knows that for any Nokia smartphones to be successful, the phone maker needs to do more and fast in the app and content space. In a close-door meeting with industry analyst, Nokia’s two leaders, Bryan Biniak and Amit Patel detailed Nokia’s app ecosystem initiatives and answered our questions. I left the meeting with an overall feeling that these two Nokia leaders know where the gaps are between...

In conjunction with this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Parks Associates released new mobile industry research detailing the dynamic mobile data market from the perspective of the mobile operator. The research report, Optimization & Monetization Mobile Data Traffic , reveals that mobile network operator revenues are declining due to increased competition. "Since 2008, revenues from voice services for the top-four U.S. mobile network operators (MNOs) have...

PayPal is on offensive at all fronts. The three initiatives launched sequentially within 48 hours show a multi-facet effort from PayPal to conquer the mobile payment market. First, it announced on the eve of MWC a dedicated mobile payment app for Samsung’s Galaxy Gear II—the new smart watch. Then during the S5 event in the evening of 24 th , it announced it will be the payment solution partner to Samsung to power the Galaxy S5’s fingerprint-based NFC payment function. To round it up,...

Last week saw an interesting and very public war of words between the chief executives of two of mobile world’s well-known brands – Blackberry and T-Mobile.  The social media war ignited after T-Mobile’s email offer encouraging existing Blackberry customers to “upgrade” to iPhones.  This was quickly followed by an angry retort from John Chen, CEO of Blackberry in a blog post on Blackberry website and the strong backlash of loyal Blackberry customers on social...

Technology within our homes is here to stay. New devices and applications seem to enrich the connected home market almost daily, and research indicates that more and more households are embracing these technological advances. However, bigger technology also means bigger energy output. Though consumers are willing to purchase and use smart devices in their homes, the adoption rate of energy-saving programs and initiatives by utility companies is not near the same rate. In fact, Parks...

Parks Associates data shows that the number of streaming music users has doubled in the last two years, while the number of paying subscribers has surged 166% over the same period of time. Due to popularity within the space, Sprint announced it will  be offering customers premium digital music services through their mobile devices. The first offering, streaming music service through the Harman Kardon® Onyx Studio™ wireless speaker system, will be available to U.S. customers...