Posts tagged Than
AT&T Interactive: More Than 30 Percent Of Searches On Network Are Mobile
Apr 18th
AT&T Interactive released its Q1 2012 “Local Insights Report” (.pdf) earlier today. The report covers search activity on AT&T Interactive’s various properties (online, mobile and IPTV), which together comprise its YP Local Ad Network. The data in the report are gleaned…
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4G Wireless Can Be Faster Than Wired Internet
Apr 17th
If you have been using various forms of wired data connections, you might want to take a closer look at the various 4G wireless networks and their phones.
Based on informal tests here at ReadWriteWeb and more extensive tests elsewhere, going wireless now could be a way to speed up your Internet connection!
In my quick tests, Charter’s 15Mbps cable-modem connection delivered about 9Mbps for downloads and about 3MB for uploads. That is plenty fast, though sometimes it is a lot slower than that, which is what you would expect from a shared cable modem connection. Of course, Charter offers faster services, including packages with up to 100Mbps downloads but still only 5Mbps uploads.
That compares very favorably to my tests using an AT&T 3G iPhone, which delivered about 1Mbps down and half a meg up. You could tell it was a lot slower. But the real champ was an AT&T LG Nitro 4G phone: It clocked in at nearly 19Mbps down and more than 5Mbps up! Those are pretty impressive speeds for a mobile device – the download speed is nearly twice as fast as my wired connection.
And it isn’t just me: PC World found multiple megabit-per-second speeds on the various 4G networks that it tested this week as well, with AT&T reaching close to 10Mbps averaged across 10 cities.
With those kinds of speeds, your mobile device can do everything your wired devices can do. Watch a video? No problem and no pauses as it streams to the phone. Download a big fat file? Don’t give it a second thought.
At least until the wireless bills come in.
That’s the rub with 4G wireless: While the performance is unprecedented, you have to be very careful how you use it. As those “unlimited” data plans bite the dust in favor of expensive pay-per-MB plans, truly taking advantage of 4G speed could end up costing you hundreds of dollars per month. More than one tech columnist has reported burning through his monthly data allotments in the first day or so of usage. Not good.
Now, not all American wireless carriers are eliminating their unlimited data plans. Sprint, for example, will sell you an unlimited 4G data plan for as little as $70 a month, including 450 talk minutes. But Sprint has the poorest coverage of the four carriers here in St. Louis. And the other carriers offering “unlimited plans” are less generous, or have restrictions and lots of fine print.
RWW’s mobile guru Dan Rowinski, who has written about the differences among 3G/4G here, says:
“From a theoretical perspective, the cable carriers still can provide the best speeds with hardline integrations up to 100Mbps downlinks. But those speeds from providers such as Comcast, Time Warner or RCN can become cost prohibitive for the consumer and expensive even for enterprises. When it comes to speed and functionality at a lower cost point for the average user, LTE provides speeds higher than the average cable package tied to a Wi-Fi router. In empirical testing, both Verizon and AT&T’s LTE significantly outperform 3G technologies and will deliver better speeds and reliability than your home wireless. From an individual device perspective, LTE will be more cost efficient and faster than other options.”
A better strategy may be to use one of the Clear.com devices. They offer unlimited WiMax/4G data for $50 a month, slightly more than what I pay for cable-modem service. The advantage is, I can take the little gizmo with me on the road and avoid those annoying wireless data charges at hotels and other hotspots.
Until now, I wasn’t convinced that Clear was clearly for me. But after seeing those 4G performance numbers, I’m beginning to come around. Maybe wireless really is the way to go.
Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.com.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Google Loved More Than Apple, Facebook, Twitter in U.S. [Poll]
Apr 9th
Google is the most popular tech company in the U.S., with 82 percent of Americans having a favorable opinion and 53 percent indicating a “strongly” favorable opinion of the company, according to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
It’s Not Highlander: There Can Be More Than One Open Source Cloud
Apr 6th
The last few days have been, to say the least, interesting for cloud watchers. If you care at all about the open source cloud, it’s been a major week. OpenStack pushed out its Essex release, but not in time to avoid having to share a news cycle with the announcement that Citrix wants to donate CloudStack to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).
Sponsor
Predictably, the stories have pitted CloudStack and OpenStack as rivals. CloudStack has been painted as a troubled project and Citrix has been painted as “walking away” from OpenStack. The press usually gets the blame for the “us vs. them” stories, but the truth is that companies involved in OpenStack can take some credit here. I had several pitches from OpenStack-backers immediately following the CloudStack announcement, looking to chime in and deride the project. One of the folks I intended to talk to about the OpenStack release couldn’t be bothered to schedule a call for that – being too busy pitching press to talk smack about CloudStack.
Truth is, if you paid attention you’d see that Citrix hadn’t been very active in OpenStack Essex development in the first place. Then again, neither have a bunch of the so-called OpenStack partners. The OpenStack community claims 155 companies for the OpenStack ecosystem, but only 55 companies participated in development according to the OpenStack press release.
Lighten Up MacLeod
To hear them go at it, you’d think that open source cloud was a zero-sum game. It’s a bit like Highlander, except with much better acting and special effects. Seriously, have you watched Highlander? After more than 20 years of hearing references to Highlander and “there can be only one!” I finally broke down and watched the movie a few months ago. I wish I hadn’t. But I digress…
Turns out, I wasn’t the only one thinking Highlander. I pinged RedMonk’s Donnie Berkholz, who has been a Gentoo developer for many years as well. Berkholz says, “cloud stacks haven’t done a great job of delineating all the niches in their space – many of them still think they can be everything for everyone. This creates the same Highlander-style perception that there can be only one.”
Find Your Niche
Instead of trying to fight to be all things to all people, Berkholz says they should try to “focus on deciding and communicating the missions of each project along with how they can fit together into the broader cloud ecosystem.”
This, eventually, happened in the Linux market. In the early days, every distribution tried to fit all niches. That didn’t work. Red Hat, for example, finally decided that it really didn’t see much point in pursuing the desktop. I hear that’s worked out relatively well for them. Novell/SUSE have carved out a pretty good niche on IBM’s hardware.
Citrix’s announcement should be seen as unalloyed good news for everybody involved. Yes, really. A vendor-sponsored project is going to a vendor-neutral organization that has a track record of doing well by open source projects. CloudStack has a number of deployments and paying customers, and a lot of companies have pledged to support it.
Assuming even one-third of the companies that pledged to support CloudStack become serious contributors, CloudStack should have a bright future. It takes little away from OpenStack for CloudStack to succeed.
Likewise, CloudStack already uses OpenStack’s Object Storage (Swift). There’s no reason that the two projects can’t share components and find ways to differentiate themselves for different markets. (The same is also true for Eucalyptus, OpenNebula and any other open cloud projects out there.)
After all the dust settles, it would be best for everyone from the open source cloud communities to figure out how they can work together. The “there can be only one” approach isn’t going to help anybody, and may benefit Amazon, VMware and other proprietary vendors who can market their wares without any drama.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
For Social Media Marketers, SEO Is Much More Popular Than PPC – Search Engine Land
Apr 3rd
 Search Engine Land |
For Social Media Marketers, SEO Is Much More Popular Than PPC
Search Engine Land Social media marketers are much more likely to also use SEO in their marketing efforts than PCC, according to a new survey out today. Social Media Examiner announced the results of its fourth annual survey, which this year had replies from more than … |
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For Social Media Marketers, SEO Is Much More Popular Than PPC
Apr 3rd
Social media marketers are much more likely to also use SEO in their marketing efforts than PCC, according to a new survey out today. Social Media Examiner announced the results of its fourth annual survey, which this year had replies from more than 3,800 social media marketers around the world….
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Research: Exchange Private Cloud Cheaper Than Public Cloud for Enterprises
Mar 28th
The typical wisdom around Microsoft’s platform strategy during the past three years has been that the company is desperate to move its existing server software product customers to a cloud-based model in order to retain those customers amid growing competition. A research report from Osterman released this morning throws icy cold water on that theory. Indeed, the research team has found through direct calculation that the reason Microsoft wants to move enterprise server customers to the cloud is because that’s where the payoff is.
Using a model of a 5,000-user enterprise based around Microsoft’s three principal communications platforms – Exchange, SharePoint and Lync (sometimes called the Unified Communications stack), during 36 months of simulated licensed use, the Osterman team found the following: Of three possible configurations – conventional on-premise, private cloud and public cloud – it is the private cloud option that is the least expensive for the enterprise.
Sponsor
The takeaway here is that the savings that small organizations receive by going with public cloud deployments – which Osterman confirms remain sizable – do not scale up for bigger companies.
“While public cloud providers include a variety of hardware, switching, storage, license fees and other features in the base price of their offerings,” the Osterman report reads, “this base price is significantly higher than the fully amortized price of the hardware, software and other infrastructure elements offered in a private cloud deployment.” The report was sponsored by Azaleos, which incidentally is a managed services provider in its own right, including hybrid deployments of UC services.
[Chart credit: Osterman Research]
When deploying Microsoft Exchange, the Osterman team discovered that enterprises pay 26% less during a 36-month period for a private cloud-based deployment than for licensing Microsoft’s hosted Exchange service in its public cloud. They also pay 16% less for private cloud than for traditional on-premise installations. Osterman makes clear that on-premise installations, under its definition, are managed entirely in-house, while private cloud installations allow for co-location and (incidentally) managed service providers.
The gap is still sizable, but reduced somewhat when all three UC components are taken into account. Enterprises spend 10% on private cloud deployments of Exchange, SharePoint and Lync than for Microsoft’s comparable hosted Office 365 services, and 16% less than for on-premise deployments of all three, during a 36-month period. That’s the typical period now for many businesses’ requisitioning cycles – no longer the four- or five-year cycle that was common in the previous decade.
The clincher for large businesses, Osterman Research found, is all the extra costs they have to incur to upgrade what are essentially small business-class services – costs that accrue monthly. Office 365 licensing is the cheaper way to go for SMBs. But Microsoft offers its O365 licenses as upgrades to its lower tiers, which enterprises still pay for.
So in the Exchange licensing model, a per-seat/per-month license for Hosted Exchange with all the necessary features (like migration assistance and help desk support) costs $6.28, while the standard Software Assurance licensing fees for a private cloud deployment of Exchange costs $8.45. But once enterprise-class services are added, and the E2 tier license gets upgraded to E3, the public cloud license costs $27.81 per-seat/per-month versus $20.51 for a comparable private cloud Exchange deployment.
The phenomenon does not translate to all three of Microsoft’s UC components. SharePoint’s cheapest licensing model is the public cloud option, Osterman found, costing a total of $31.96 per-user/per-month for 5,000 users for Hosted SharePoint versus $34.74 for a private cloud installation. However, the study points out, that gap can be more than compensated for by opting to exclude the backup site for disaster recovery.
The firm also concedes that price savings for on-premise deployments – the most expensive option in any case – can perhaps be found by systems designers who plan for resource sharing, rather than siloing the UC components among separate servers. Still, the findings contradict the conventional wisdom that public-cloud based pricing is just as upwardly scalable as the deployments themselves.
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Why A Diverse Link Profile Is More Critical Than Ever
Mar 27th
I really hate reading articles where people say “I told you so” or blast someone’s techniques, but the recent crackdown and deindexing of blog networks is a great lesson in what can happen if you rely on any one method in link building. I know people who run these types of…
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Survey: Google Pays Less, Harder Interviews But Better Place To Work Than At Facebook
Mar 23rd
Glassdoor has released their 2012 survey of best places to work in 2012 and Google has beat Facebook for the first time in four years in that survey. Google scored a 3.9 overall by their employees while Facebook scored a 3.7. In 2011 Facebook scored a 4.2 and Google scored a 4.1. Although Facebook…
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Survey: Google Pays Less, Harder Interviews But Better Place To Work At Than Facebook
Mar 23rd
Glassdoor has released their 2012 survey of best places to work in 2012 and Google has beat Facebook for the first time in four years in that survey. Google scored a 3.9 overall by their employees while Facebook scored a 3.7. In 2011 Facebook scored a 4.2 and Google scored a 4.1. Although Facebook…
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