Month: January 2015

The AT&T Tilt™ is a 3G UMTS/HSDPA Windows Mobile device with a large touch screen and a spacious keyboard. The AT&T Tilt™ is the most comprehensive wireless device on the market today. This device keeps you connected with email, text and instant messaging, Internet access, personal organizer, video, satellite radio, and more all at broadband speeds. Wi-Fi, GPS navigation and Push-to-Talk round out the robust features on the newest device from AT&T making the Tilt your ultimate mobile companion.

Telstra has quietly rolled out a new customer support forum designed to help Telstra customers assist other customers and foster a community around their services.

Telstra crowd-sourcing support (Credit: diongillard/Flickr)

The site, dubbed “CrowdSupport“, appears to have gone live over the past week but as you’d expect from a new site so far is mostly empty with just over 100 posts to date.

Aside from interacting with other Telstra customers, users can give “kudos” to messages that are useful or important effectively thanking other users for advice, message Telstra staff and other users interacting on the site, comment on issues impacting the telco and discuss ideas that Telstra should implement.

For the moment, two Telstra employees appear to be fleshing out content on the site, posting between them a number of handy hints and advice for customers including a number of handy T-Box fixes and a link to a self-developed widget to check your BigPond account usage.

Rather than build their own solution, it appears Telstra have opted to use a third-party platform to power the site, opting for Lithium’s social customer suite which the company promotes as being able to “engage your social customers with (a) habit-forming community experience”.

Companies including AT&T, Best Buy, Lenovo and HP also utilise the platform in their own respective communities.

It follows in the footsteps of Vodafone Hutchison Australia who also recently launched their own customer support forum as an additional way to get assistance following their disastrous start to the year which left their support phone lines struggling to cope. They too use Lithium to power the community.

The launch of the site is the latest initiative by Telstra to communicate with customers on multiple platforms following the success they’ve met using social media such as Twitter to assist clients.

It also follows Wednesday’s announcement of a major restructure focused on improving customer service and support as well as re-focus the company in preparation for post-National Broadband Network rollout.

The latest buzz around Facebook has been its growth as a video hub in its own right. With a monthly audience of 41.3 million viewers, the social network now ranks as the Web’s No. 5 video property, according to comScore. Facebook also says more than 20 million videos are being uploaded to the site each month and more than 2 billion are being watched.

Given the growing video audience and usage on Facebook, how does video advertising actually perform on the site? A new study by video analytics firm TubeMogul found that video ad units on Facebook generally had higher engagement rates and lower cost-per-view than comparable stand-alone, display video ads on third-party sites.

The study presented at the OMMA Video conference in New York Tuesday looked at four types of video ads on Facebook: its official sponsored video ad placement that appears on the right side of a logged-in user’s home page; in-banner units in applications; interstitials in apps and games on Facebook; and video ads that users watch in return for earning virtual currency in games to buy virtual goods to accelerate game play.

TubeMogul then compared the performance of 25 major video ad campaigns and 60 million views across the Facebook ad units with the same ads in click-to-play video ad units on other sites, based on criteria including viewing time, cost and clicks per view. Brands included Symantec, Microsoft, Hyundai and 20th-Century Fox.

Overall, it found that completion rates for Facebook ads were roughly 5.5% to 9.5% higher than identical videos run in display units on outside publisher sites. Completion rates for Facebook’s virtual currency and app in-banner video ads were both above 40% compared to about 25% for in-banner video ads on other sites.

The Facebook virtual currency — or in-game — video ad also had the longest average view time, at 54.7 seconds per view, followed by the Facebook in-banner, at 48.6 seconds, the third-party in-banner, 39.6, and the Facebook interstitial, at 11.2. TubeMogul co-founder Brett Wilson noted that the interstitials had the shortest views because people don’t like the auto-play ads and tend to skip them. They are also typically shorter than other kinds of video ads.

Not surprisingly, viewers also were more likely to share videos in Facebook’s virtual currency and app in-banner ads with friends on Facebook or Twitter than video ads on other sites. The social-sharing rates for the two Facebook formats were 1.5% to 2% compared to less than half a percent for outside video ads.

The click-through rate on the virtual currency ad was also highest, at 5%, versus just over 3% for video display ads on third-party sites. And when it comes to pricing, the virtual currency ads also shaped up as the best buy, at 30 cents on a cost-per-view basis. That compares to $5.27 for Facebook app in-banner ads, $1.06 for Facebook’s sponsored video unit, and $1.07 for stand-alone video ads on other sites.

“So the video in social game unit looks really promising and appears to have a lot of bang for the buck,” said TubeMogul’s Wilson, highlighting the monthly audience of 70 million for the popular FarmVille game on Facebook. But he warned that marketers should be careful in social game video ads to focus on unique viewers rather than views. That’s because “some game publishers break the rules and let gamers click play on a video [ad] multiple times to rack up points,” he said.

European carriers may not sell quite as many Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPhones as AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T), but there’s still a good reason to have them on the books, according to René Obermann, CEO of Deutsche Telekom AG(NYSE: DT). He says the device is driving up average wireless data usage as much as 30 times higher than on other phones.

The CEO revealed the data figures this week as the German carrier revealed key metrics around its T-Mobile International AG cellular operations in Europe and the U.S. In Germany, T-Mobile has sold 70,000 iPhones with contracts. (See T-Mobile Boasts Subscriber Growth.)

These phones are helping to drive up mobile data use for the operator, Obermann says. “iPhone customers retrieve weather reports, stock prices, and YouTube videos from the Internet on the go — all as a matter of course.

“The average Internet usage for an iPhone customer is more than 100 MBytes. This is 30 times the use for our average contract-based consumer customers.”

Note that Obermann doesn’t specify if that is per month. Carriers, however, do generally measure users’ data consumption on a monthly basis.

The ability to watch TV and download video and music on a phone can dramatically increase the volume of data that a mobile user burns through anyway, notes Unstrung Insider senior analyst Gabriel Brown with a personal example: “I used 100 MBytes in an hour and a half listening to Internet radio on my phone the other day.”

Ramping up data usage rates is extremely important to Western European carriers since they need to replace voice revenues and find alternatives to text messaging, which is expected to reach saturation point over the next few years. (See Analysys Reports on Voice ARPU.)

Heavy Reading senior analyst Patrick Donegan suggests that such potential data increases may also be a reason for wireless carriers to re-examine their backhaul capabilities in the near future. (See T- Mobile Busts Backhaul Bottleneck.)

“Datapoints like this suggest that many operators are still underestimating the impact that data is going to have on their backhaul networks,” says Donegan. “The ability to support these data volumes flexibly and cost effectively in the backhaul network is going to differentiate mobile carrier performance just as much as their ability to win over the end user market at the front end.”

— Dan Jones, Site Editor, Unstrung