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Surveys conducted and sponsored by research firm BTIG suggest that movie viewers might actually spend more money on films, if they were available online or on cable video-on-demand services at the same time as they are available in theaters. The post from BTIG’s Richard Greenfield (free registration required to view) details three different surveys conducted over the last few weeks, which asked respondents to forecast their theatrical and home entertainment spending if windows were to collapse.

All of the surveys leveraged Survey Monkey to poll respondents, but the most complete of the three polled the Survey Monkey Audience (SMA) network, racking up 1,124 responses. About 70 percent of respondents from the SMA survey said their spending on entertainment wouldn’t change if priced in the $20-$25 range. But while the majority of users predict no change, the number who say they would spend more outnumber those who predict they would spend less by three to one.

According to Greenfield, that group appeared to be price-sensitive and more likely representative of today’s average consumer that respondents from the other surveys. Those who expected to spend more would be doing so because they saw cost savings from concessions and parking outweighing the difference in price and convenience of watching at home. In addition, some respondents suggested that they were unhappy with the current moviegoing experience.

In aggregate, the survey shows that Hollywood studios would likely make more revenue with the collapse of movie windows. More importantly, those sales would come with better margins since they wouldn’t be sharing with exhibitors. The fear seems to be that putting pressure on the theatrical window could cause some exhibitors to go out of business, which would in turn destroy that distribution channel.

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Report after report points to AT&T marrying Dish Network after Ma Bell’s forced breakup with T-Mobile, but given the companies’ increasing belligerence, you wouldn’t think that was the case.

AT&T is petitioning the Federal Communications Commission to impose network buildout conditions on Dish’s satellite spectrum –- requirements that would be passed onto AT&T if it acquired the satellite TV provider. Meanwhile, Dish insists it plans to use that spectrum to build a commercial LTE network to challenge the reigning nationwide mobile operators, including AT&T. These are hardly the actions of two companies about to tie the knot.

What we’re witnessing here is some very cynical pre-nuptial gamesmanship. According to TMF Associates satellite communications analyst Tim Farrar, Dish is playing AT&T off its competitors by threatening to partner with MetroPCS to build a nationwide LTE network over its satellite broadband and 700 MHz spectrum. To muck up Dish’s plans, AT&T is insisting to the FCC that the satellite TV provider face the same strict rollout requirements the commission imposed on fellow satellite spectrum holder LightSquared: An LTE rollout covering 100 million people in 33 months and 260 million in less than 6 years.

As Farrar wrote in his blog:

This submission is a blatant attempt by AT&T to put a thumb on the scales, as the FCC weighs up the appropriate balance between buildout mandates and clawback of any windfall. The reason for AT&T’s action at this very late stage in the process appears to be that DISH is trying to play off AT&T’s prospective bid against a potential venture with MetroPCS. MetroPCS would certainly be unwilling to commit to a 260M POP buildout, so if the FCC conceded AT&T’s demands, they would be the only game in town and DISH would lose its leverage in price negotiations. We’ll find out soon enough if AT&T’s gambit succeeds, but few would bet against [Dish chairman] Charlie Ergen’s poker playing skills after the events of the last year.

AT&T may seem like the bad guy here, but Dish’s motives are just as suspect. In an FCC filling Thursday, Dish maintained it plans become a competing mobile operator, launching an LTE network that would compete with the big 4:

The overly aggressive and unrealistic schedule AT&T advocates would likely set DISH up for failure or force DISH into unfavorable business arrangements with large Commercial Mobile Radio Service (“CMRS”) carriers.  It would erect artificial barriers to DISH’s plan to construct a new mobile broadband network on its own or consideration of partnerships with smaller companies, and could threaten DISH’s ability to roll out a retail service.  In short, an impracticably tight schedule would be a triple loss for consumers, the Commission, and DISH.

But as my colleague Stacey Higginbotham wrote when Dish first applied for permission to build LTE, Dish’s proposal sounds more like a financial gamble to cash in on the skyrocketing value of mobile broadband spectrum, rather than a legitimate bid to become a wireless competitor. One big clue is Dish’s insistence on deploying an LTE-Advanced network in order to “enter the market for the first time with the most advanced technology.” Of course, LTE-Advanced was just finalized as a standard so Dish claims it will have to wait several years before commercial equipment is available.

That’s absolute malarkey. LTE-Advanced is an iteration of LTE technology, not a completely new network. Claiming that you must wait until LTE-Advanced equipment is available before building a network is kind of like insisting you can’t move into a house before the shag carpeting is installed. There’s nothing stopping Dish from building an LTE network this year and evolving it into an LTE-Advanced network in 2013 or 2014.

Supposedly we face a spectrum crisis, but no one is acting like it. Instead of using public airwaves to deploy real networks, operators seem to be playing high-stakes poker with their licenses. AT&T’s motives may be self-serving, but maybe in this case it’s right. If it forces strict rollout guidelines on Dish’s spectrum and then buys those licenses, we may actually get a new mobile broadband network – rather than a bunch of operators whining about how they don’t have the spectrum to build them.

Poker Image courtesy of Flickr user Ross Elliott
Tower Image courtesy of Flickr user Nikhil Verma

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If there was a bright spot in the latest quarterly results from the New York Times, it’s the fact that the newspaper’s metered paywall has attracted almost 325,000 subscribers willing to pay a monthly fee for the site. Despite all the celebrating from the pro-paywall camp, however, that bright spot was more than overshadowed by the other dark clouds in the numbers — including the fact that print advertising revenue continues to decline, and the paper’s former online jewel About.com got whacked by Google’s algorithm updates. Anyone who takes on the job of CEO at the media company is going to have to start thinking creatively about its business, because all the easy money has already been made.

Although the paywall and related print-subscription deals helped boost circulation revenue by almost 5 percent in the NYT’s media group — which includes the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the International Herald Tribune — and digital advertising revenue was also up by about 5 percent for the quarter, neither of those things were able to compensate for the continued drop-off in print advertising. Print ad revenue fell by almost 8 percent, which helped push the NYT’s fourth-quarter profit down by more than 12 percent, and for the full year the company reported a loss of $40 million.

Paywall revenue isn’t even close to making up the gap

The New York Times didn’t provide any helpful charts that would make the reality of this situation more obvious, so one blogger decided to come up with his own. Paul McMorrow, an editor at CommonWealth magazine, put together a chart that shows the contrast between the NYT’s advertising revenue, circulation revenue and its total revenue:

According to newspaper-industry analyst Ken Doctor, the NYT is probably pulling in about $86 million or so from its digital paywall — or “metered access,” as the paper likes to call it, since you get to read 20 articles for free before you get hit with a request for your credit card. But that’s not even close to being enough to make up for the decline in ad revenue, both print and digital, which dropped by 7 percent in the quarter.

One of the biggest problems for the Times is that its former online star About.com, which the company bought in 2005 for $410 million, has seen both its profitability and revenue-generating ability implode in the wake of an update to Google’s search algorithm — a change that was designed to penalize what the company called “low quality” content sites, or what some call “content farms.” In the most recent quarter, the NYT said About’s revenue fell by 26 percent, and profit fell by a staggering 67 percent.

As McMorrow’s chart shows, the Times is still far under water in terms of revenue, despite the benefit of its paywall. As I’ve argued before, there’s nothing wrong with having a paywall — although in many cases it amounts to building a wall of sandbags around the print newspaper edition, which provides most of the ad revenue — but if a paywall is your only strategy for responding to digital disruption of the media business, then you are almost certainly doomed, whether you are the New York Times or not.

Which way will the new CEO go — towards the past or the future?

So what should a new CEO be looking at to revitalize the NYT for a digital age? Ken Doctor suggests that the paper needs to look beyond just subcription revenue and focus on how it can target those 325,000 digital subscribers — since it knows who they are and where they live, and it already has their credit-card numbers.

I would take it one step further, however, and suggest that the new CEO think about some of the suggestions about “reverse paywalls” that have been made by journalism professor Jeff Jarvis, and also by former Washington Post managing editor Raju Narisetti (who is now at the Wall Street Journal in a digital role). The main principle behind this idea is that regular readers should get more than just a sales rep hitting them up for a monthly payment — the fact that they are a devoted fan should entitle them to earn rewards, whether it’s money off their subscription for interacting with the paper, or offers that others don’t get.

The NYT has taken a few steps towards trying to build relationships with its readers through what I’ve called the “levelling up” process that it recently added to its comment section, where readers can achieve preferred status for good behavior. Those are the building blocks of a relationship that the paper could use to its own benefit in all kinds of ways, many of which could generate new sources of revenue — real-life events, for example, which has been one of the things that has helped turn The Atlantic around, or a line of e-books based on the newspaper’s original reporting.

Another thing the NYT could — and should — be thinking about is what the role of an information provider is in the digital age. Is it to act as a gatekeeper for certain kinds of data and try to reimpose the scarcity that used to exist in the print era? Or is it to find partners to distribute that information in as many ways as possible, and to think of the paper as a data platform, as The Guardian has with its open-platform project? One way looks to the past, and the other to the future. Which way will the NYT go?

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users jphilipg and Giuseppe Bognanni

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Though Silicon Valley has lured away plenty of start-ups, (cough: Facebook), New York is becoming a magnet of its own, attracting companies that want to build their businesses amid the bright lights of the big city. In the last couple months, New York has drawn former San Francisco start-up Qwiki, PlaceIQ from Colorado and recent 500 Startups graduate Snapette, which started in Boston before spending the last half year in Silicon Valley.

These are just a few recent transplants but they show how New York increasingly makes sense as a headquarters for certain start-ups, especially those with ties to finance, fashion, media, retail, advertising and increasingly big data and location-based services. ConsumerBell relocated to New York from the Bay Area in May and Take The Interview, which started in Boston, is moving as well. The relocations fuel the continuing momentum behind New York, which has eclipsed Boston in the number of VC deals and is now becoming a destination for big companies like Facebook, which announced an engineering campus here and eBay, which bought Hunch and plans to build out a New York office.

Close to brands and retailers

I talked with Snapette founder Sarah Paiji about why she chose New York after building up a lot of connections in Silicon Valley and Boston. She said despite the presence of Facebook and Google in the Bay Area, it made more sense to be near brands and retailers, who are mostly based in New York. Snapette, which recently moved into Dogpatch Labs, is a kind of Pinterest for the real world, with users supplying images of products that can be found in nearby shops.

Snapette co-founder Sarah Paiji

“We are about fashion and shopping. We want to drive foot traffic into local stores. We also take a lot of meetings with brands and retailers and we have over 30 boutique partners in New York. In Palo Alto, it just doesn’t make as much sense to stay,” Paiji said.

PlaceIQ, a Boulder, Colo. location startup, also announced a move to New York in December, saying it wanted to be closer to partners and customers and the general ecosystem. PlaceIQ has built a vast database of locations down to the block level that can be used by advertisers to better target consumers without tracking them individually.

New York has changed

Duncan McCall, CEO and co-founder of PlaceIQ said he had no interest in ever relocating to New York. But over the last year after making a lot of visits to see customers, partners and company investor IA Ventures, he realized the city had changed and was now a logical home for his start-up. And he was tired of traveling so much and saw the value of more face-to-face meetings. He just moved into a new temporary space in the last few days and is hunting for more permanent digs.

“I previously spent some time in New York and I thought the technology business isn’t big enough, there’s not enough talent and there wasn’t a business around data. But that’s changed dramatically in New York,” McCall said. “Over the last year, it’s grown on me. The people and the investment scene are great and with the customers and ecosystem, it became obvious that if we want to maximize our chances, we have to be in New York.”

Qwiki's new SoHo headquarters

Qwiki, which helps produce multimedia information videos, announced its move in December and relocated into a hip SoHo space. CEO Doug Imbruce said in blog post that despite being known as a Silicon Valley company, the company saw New York as the place to become a medium for people to tell stories and share opinions. Qwiki needs to be close to where the most content was produced and that’s New York, he said.

Local strengths

Not every company will be tempted to make the move. But these recent transplants show there’s plenty of incentive to do so. With so much media and advertising here, a company like Qwiki can tap a lot of media partners as it pursues more publishing tools for users. Snapette is closely aligned with the fashion industry and revolves around location, something New York is becoming good at with Foursquare, Hyperpublic, LocalResponse. New York’s big data scene has also risen to the fore, building on the experience of the finance industry which has long been involved in data. Now with ventures funds like IA Ventures, which looks primarily at big data opportunities, there’s more momentum here in building data start-ups.

Paiji and McCall said the move to New York comes with trade-offs. Paiji said it’s harder to find talent and for a start-up mostly made up of women, they get less attention from men now that they’re away from testosterone heavy Silicon Valley. And, McCall said he doesn’t have ready access to skiing like he did in Colorado.

Not ready to topple Silicon Valley

SA 500 job fair

New York has also lost some start-ups including Think Near which moved to Los Angeles and BankSimple, which moved to Portland. And many companies still flock to Silicon Valley to make their big break. The Valley still has an edge in investment dollars and talent and has a culture built around entrepreneurship that has flourished for decades thanks to companies like Apple, Google, eBay, Facebook and others.

New York has to continue building its start-up culture and fix its talent crunch problems, which could be alleviated by a new applied sciences university and programs like the HackNY, the Turing Fellowship and SA500. But with more investors, incubators, start-up infrastructure and companies moving in, New York is increasingly an appealing place for start-ups. Will it topple Silicon Valley any time soon? No, but it’s showing that it’s becoming a competitive tech destination for start-ups convinced that if they can make it there…

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Video discovery startup Taboola has been growing fast, adding top publishing partners like BusinessWeek and The Washington Post, as well as expanding into the live streaming video vertical. Those new partners have helped drive growth for Taboola, which now reaches more than 100 million uniques a month.

According to data from Quantcast, Taboola has reach of more than 110 million unique visitors a month. Of those viewers, more than 65 million are in the U.S. alone. As a result, Taboola generates more than 300 million recommendations every day, CEO and founder Adam Singolda told me by email.

While Taboola, which provides a widget for recommended videos, has traditionally been used by news publishers like the New York Times who are trying to expand their available video inventory and advertising revenues, it’s been tapped by two new partners in the live streaming vertical. Ustream and Major League Gaming now both make Taboola recommendations available to their viewers.

With the move to provide recommendations for live streaming viewers, Taboola has had to add capabilities beyond just the contextual targeting that it typically uses to match up video recommendations for users. Because videos are live, the recommendations engine doesn’t have as much data to go on. So Taboola is providing recommendations based on behavioral targeting while viewers are watching live streams.

Outside of the live video market, Taboola has also added new partners. Those include BusinessWeek, The Washington Post, Food Network, The Hollywood Reporter, Daily Caller, Ask Men and Gannett’s Navy Times. With some of those publishers, the Taboola video widget is on every page of their websites.

As publishers try to expand their use of video, they need ways to highlight the content that they’ve produced. Taboola can not only provide recommendations, but can also expand the amount of video available to viewers by recommending those from other publishers and sharing revenues between them.

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Updated. The Verizon Galaxy Nexus LTE handset is reportedly no longer a Google-supported developer phone, which could have software update implications. Droid-Life has some screen shots indicating that the CDMA Galaxy Nexus — and as well as Sprint’s Nexus S — no longer appear on Google’s page showing how to get devices into fastboot mode. This mode is used to lock down the phone’s software.

I hit up some web pages that I recently bookmarked to help me flash images on my GSM Galaxy Nexus and I can validate what Droid-Life is seeing. The CDMA stock images for the Galaxy Nexus, for example now show a status of “archived, for reference only.”

I’m reaching out to sources to see what this means, because it could imply nothing more than the removal of developer options in the Settings screen of the CDMA Galaxy Nexus. But if not, I wonder if this is Verizon’s effort to gain complete control over the software on its Galaxy Nexus. It’s worth recalling that Verizon was expected to get the original Nexus One, but that never happened and no explanation was ever provided. It’s not a stretch to think that a control issue at that time entered into the situation.

The other possibility here is that this is related to Google Wallet and Verizon’s push for its own mobile payment solution in Isis. A Google statement provided to The Verge indicates this to be the case. If Verizon does have ownership over the Galaxy Nexus software, the handsets could lose a key advantage: Gaining the most recent software updates before other phones. That attribute is a key selling point of the Galaxy Nexus and if this does happen, I’m sure current owners of the smartphone will be upset.

Update: On a Google Groups page for Android Contributors, the following clarification was written after this post:

For various technical reasons, recent CDMA Android devices implement core telephony functionality in .apk files provided in binary form by the carriers. To function correctly, these .apk files must be signed by the so-called “platform” key. However, when an individual creates a custom build from the AOSP source code, they don’t use the same signing key as these CDMA flies were signed with.

The result is that these files don’t work properly, and pure AOSP builds running on these devices can’t place calls, access mobile data, and so on. Because we aim to make sure that we are as clear as possible about the degree of support that devices have, we updated the docs over atsource.android.com to reflect this reality. We will still make available as many as possible of the closed-source binaries for these devices, and Nexus devices will continue to have unlockable bootloaders. And, of course, GSM/HSPA+ devices are still supported, as are any other devices we’re able to support. We’ve simply updated the documentation to be clearer about the current extent of CDMA support. So this doesn’t appear to be an issue with Google Wallet or a wresting of control; it’s more of a clarification on CDMA support for Nexus phones. Whew!

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While 2011 was a bad year for Hewlett-Packard, it was a very good one for chairman Ray Lane, at least financially.

Lane, who became executive chairman of HP on September 22, 2011 (he had been non-executive chairman since November 1, 2010, the start of HP’s FY 2011)  logged more than $10 million in total compensation — the bulk of it in stock and options — for the fiscal year, according to the HP proxy.

But check out the numbers for yourself.

Other highlights from the proxy:

Meg Whitman who famously took the HP CEO position in September for $1 in salary, gets $16 million in stock and options. Former CEO Leo Apotheker walked away with $30.4 million when he was fired by HP last September.

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Former iPhone marketing manager Bob Borchers tells students how Steve Jobs originally approached the iPhone team with the challenge of building the iPhone, a device that to date has sold 183 million units in less than five years.

Google’s Fiber organization is asking the FCC for the ability to test a residential gateway that has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It’s likely Google is asking the FCC for an experimental licence to test upcoming 802.11ac gigabit Wi-Fi technology inside residential gateways.

However, those longing for innovation in broadband here in the U.S. can hope that there are bigger plans in the works. With a fiber to the home network and gigabit Wi-Fi Google could take a cue from the recent launches in France and in the U.S. of mobile networks that lean heavily on Wi-Fi. Then Google could build a network that offers truly ubiquitous broadband within the confines of Palo Alto, Calif., and maybe later in Kansas City.

From the application to the FCC, which was spotted by Stephen Crowley,

Google Fiber seeks to test Bluetooth and Wi-Fi protocols and performance (including coordination of Wi-Fi channels between devices and in the presence of foreign signals) within an integrated access point as part of a fiber residential gateway. This line of testing will reveal real world engineering issues and reliability. The planned testing is not directed at evaluating the radio frequency characteristics of the equipment (which are known), but rather at the throughput and stability of the home networks that will support the equipment, as well as its basic functionality.

Right now, the current Wi-Fi technology (802.11n) tops out 600 Mbps, which means Wi-Fi becomes the bottleneck if you have a gigabit network coming into your home. 802.11ac’s multi-gigabit speeds would go a long way to opening up that pipe. But while chip companies have produced silicon for the next generation Wi-Fi standard, the standard itself isn’t ratified, nor are those chips in any real products that have passed through the FCC’s approval process. This application may be one of the first application for a commercial next-gen Wi-Fi device, although Google asked the FCC to keep many of the details confidential.

Of course, such powerful Wi-Fi and a fiber-to-the-home network opens up many more possibilities than mere super-fast home networking. Google could use its residential gateways and the fiber connection to blanket an entire town with incredibly fast Wi-Fi (and Bluetooth) networks. These technologies would give Google the tools to make broadband truly ubiquitous both inside and outside homes, which is a goal I’d love to see.

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Steve Appleton, chairman and CEO of Micron Technology died in a plane crash Friday morning. The small plane crashed near Boise, Idaho. Appleton was 51 years old. The news was disclosed in a company statement.

Appleton was alone, flying a small Lanceair experimental aircraft, according to the Boise Weekly. The plane reportedly crashed around 9 a.m. between two runways.

In its statement, Micron said:

Our hearts go out to his wife, Dalynn, his children and his family during this tragic time. Steve’s passion and energy left an indelible mark on Micron, the Idaho community and the technology industry at large.

Trading on Micron shares was halted on the news.  In 1984, Appleton was injured in another plane crash when his stunt plane crashed in the desert near Boise, according to this EETimes report.

Appleton joined the Boise-based semiconductor company in 1983 and was named president and COO in 1991. Three years later, he was appointed CEO, according to his company biography.

In addition to his Micron duties, Appleton served on the board of the Semiconductor Industry Association and of National Semiconductor. He was also a member of the World Semiconductor Council.

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Screenshot of Doxo healthcare (click to enlarge)

Doxo, the Seattle startup that makes “digital file cabinet” software, has thus far focused on giving users a single place to manage regularly occurring bills for services such as telephone, cable, and credit cards. But now, the company is taking on a much bigger and more complicated system: Healthcare.

Doxo is announcing Friday that a number of major healthcare provider systems have signed up to send medical bills and receive patient payments through the online service. According to Doxo, its new clients comprise 40 hospitals and 3,000 physicians, and include Saint Luke’s Health System, Advocate Health Care and Advocate Medical Group, Novant Health, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, University of Illinois Medical Center, Rockford Health System, and Rush-Copley Medical Center.

It’s a big coup for the Doxo, which was founded in 2008 and launched its service to the public in mid-2011. The company has raised $15.3 million in venture capital from Sigma Partners, Mohr Davidow Ventures and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ VC firm, Bezos Expeditions. Doxo is free for consumers, and the company charges the businesses who sign up to send bills through the service. According to Doxo CEO Steve Shivers, companies pay for the service because it saves them a significant amount of money compared to paper billing — and the healthcare space can especially benefit from this type of savings.

“Hospitals send invoices to patients three times, on average, before they pay it,” Shivers said. “So for a $10 copay, they’re spending $10 to $15 just to collect it. This is an industry that has runaway costs, and from a consumer standpoint there’s runaway complexity.”

But of course, it’s not easy to convince complex, entrenched industries like healthcare to try something new. That’s why it’s a big deal for Doxo to have inked these initial contracts. The hope is that after this initial batch, many more healthcare providers will be emboldened to sign up to do paperless billing through Doxo, Shivers said.

“Since we launched to the public last summer, the first providers we really signed up were what I call more conventional categories like banks, credit unions, alarm systems,” Shivers said. “But healthcare has been one of most important verticals for us to get into. We have these six providers signed up now, but the healthcare industry is huge. This is just the start.”

I think it’s a great move: The time for healthcare to really adopt technology is right now, and going paperless is a great first step toward that goal. Many health providers have websites that patients can create profiles for, but the reality is most people don’t go to the doctor enough to create a log-in ID and remember a password. So we end up getting paperwork sent in the mail that often goes ignored, since many of us prefer to do our bills online. It’s a big cycle that ends up creating stress for consumers and costing healthcare providers lots of money. There’s a big opportunity here, and it’s nice that a startup like Doxo is gaining a good foothold in the space.

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Thanks to apps and the cloud, smartphones are already capable of language translation, but there’s another piece of the communications puzzle when speaking to someone in another language: How to get the translation to them so that they can understand what it is your saying. A Nokia research project called Nokia Hello may be that missing piece. Even for people you really don’t want to talk to.

Nokia Hello leverages NFC, or near-field communications, chips to link two phones together. Instead of trying to speak the translation, you simply tap your phone to someone else’s and the translated text appears in their native language. There are other ways to do this of course: Some translation apps read words aloud, for example. But this solution is quiet so it could be used in a noisy environment or by someone who has hearing challenges.

As positive as the project sounds to me, I think the Nokia researchers may be taking things a little too far. In a blog post describing Nokia Hello, it sounds like the team is hoping for a full quiet-zone in the workplace:

The team working on the project estimate that the need for speech interactions with work colleagues could be eliminated entirely by 2015. Excellent news for those working in multilingual environments or who despise their workmates.

The multilingual environments part I get, but good for people who despise their workmates? Way to spread the cheer, Nokia! That funny tidbit aside, the project does show another smart use for NFC; a technology we typically associate with contactless mobile payment solutions such as Google Wallet.

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Mobile data is picking up momentum in Latin America as the number of 3G connections in the region doubled in 2011, according to a new report from Wireless Intelligence. Operators in Latin and South America are shutting down their CDMA networks, replacing them with the UMTS systems used by the GSM world, and even making their first moves to LTE. That could produce a huge surge in mobile data use over the next few years similar to what the U.S. and Canada experienced after the launch of HSPA and the first 3G iPhone.

At the end of 2011, the total number of 3G subscribers hit 100 million, accounting for 15 percent of all mobile connections, according to the report. That huge uptick in data connections makes Latin America the second-fastest growing global region, just behind the Middle East/Africa market. The region also passed 100 percent penetration in 2011, which means many customers are now sporting multiple devices.

Wireless Intelligence predicts mobile data adoption will only accelerate. The monthly run rate of 3 million 3G additions in 2011 is increasing to 4 million this year. By 2016, 3G and 4G connections will account for just under 50 percent of total subscriptions. Two operators, Columbia’s UNE and Uruguay’s Ancel, launched commercial LTE networks in 2011, while AT&T extended its LTE network to Puerto Rico. The research firm also counted 12 new HSPA+ networks going up in the region since June.

Total CDMA connections saw a huge drop, falling from 6 percent of total connections two years ago to just 2 percent as of the new year. In December, Telefonica shut down its CDMA networks in Ecuador completely, but the global operator will deal its biggest blow to CDMA in June when it packs up Brazilian operator Vivo’s 2G network, the region’s largest.

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• LTE changes everything; LTE changes nothing
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Skin Scan, a startup based in Bucharest, Romania, is selling an iPhone app that lets consumers take pictures of questionable moles and get back information on the likelihood that the mole in question is dangerous. However, during a discussion with Skin Scan’s founders at IBM’s SmartCamp competition on Thursday (where Skin Scan was among nine finalists), I found out the company has much grander goals than helping consumers figure out whether to see a doctor.

On its surface, Skin Scan’s app operatesas one might expect: users take a picture of a mole; the photo is sent to Skin Scan’s servers; Skin Scan’s algorithm analyzes the image; and results are sent back to the user. The app won’t diagnose any condition, but will visually point out abnormalities and will rate moles from low-risk to high-risk. It also refers users to nearby doctors. It’s Skin Scan’s mobile delivery model that makes it so potentially valuable, though.

As co-founder and CEO Victor Anastasiu explained to me, the company is building an analytic database to help make sense of the information it’s uncovering. Using users’ location data, for example, Skin Scan can map the world based on frequency or severity of lesions. Over time, Anastasiu said, Skin Scan should be able to determine how rates are improving or worsening, which is important because skin cancer is often best analyzed over time.

Building time-space models based on mobile data is nothing new, of course. Companies such as Google and Apple are already using anonymous location data to map traffic flows, and another SmartCamp finalist, BitCarrier, is peddling a system to city governments that lets them see traffic flow in real time based on wireless location data and react accordingly.

But Skin Scan has grander plans than even a database. Mircea Popa, another Skin Scan employee, brought up the possibility of disrupting the dermatology system as a whole. One of the company’s next steps is to digitally connect doctors and users via its platform. If doctors can examine patients’ moles without in-person visits, it saves everybody time and money. For offices that are particularly overbooked, Popa thinks Skin Scan could get them to the point where they see only the most-serious cases via office visits.

These are long-term goals, though. For now, Skin Scan is working to gain enough users to get its algorithms as accurate as possible (they’re about 70 percent accurate in assessing severity, Anastasiu said, compared with about 85 percent by dermatologists) and to build a meaningful global data set. Whether or not Skin Scan succeeds, though, its ambitions should resonate with others who want to effect change by leveraging the global reach and broad accessibility of mobile devices.

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• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Dissecting the data: 5 issues for our digital future
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012

Does your kid want to play with unicorns? You should check out next week’s Toy Fair in New York, where toy makers are converging with the latest-and-greatest augmented reality technology that brings once-static games, books and toys to life. With augmented reality, a kid viewing a book or game though an iPhone, iPad, web cam or other connected device, will see and hear animated characters that were once flat on the page.

The proliferation of these products shows that augmented reality, a technology which has a conference of its own, is going mainstream as more people carry smartphones, are always connected and want the latest and greatest experience.

San Francisco-based Nukotoys will be on hand to show off NUKO trading cards, which pop with animated monsters when viewed through an iPad, iPhone or iPod. The Monsterology cards, now in beta, will let kids collect, trade, train and play with 3D unicorns, cyclopses and sea serpents, the company said.

Digital Tech Frontier will show off its new Popar book line. The books are encoded so that a user with a webcam and a PC, will see 3-D, moving images — rocket ships blasting off, planets spinning, etc. — as they read.  (See video here.)

Other AR-adopting toy makers include Character Options, which is using the technology in its new Appgear shown at the London Toy Fair last month. And perennial fan favorite Lego is using AR in its Life of George game and in some of its product packaging.

There are many potential uses for AR. Hewlett-Packard was on the road at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and other venues showing off Autonomy’s Aurasma for retail and other applications. Bodymetrics demonstrated an AR fitting room at CES; some realtors are using AR to make house listings more compelling.

With more than 184 million iPhones on the planet, plus all the other iPads and smartphones out there, the addressable audience for AR goodies will only grow as will applications beyond fun and games.

Feature photo courtesy of  Flickr user antjeverena

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• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
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Google is asking the Federal Communications Commission for permission to test a mysterious Wi-Fi and Bluetooth-enabled “entertainment device,” in employees homes in four U.S. cities. So inquiring minds want to know, what exactly is it? And why is Google filing for the experimental license? Does that mean the search giant is getting into manufacturing its own devices?

On the what is it category, it appears to be homebound, so it could perhaps be a set-top-box style device, or a new addendum to Google TV. Here’s what Google’s application, which was filed in December, offers in terms of information:

Google is developing an entertainment device that requires testing outside the laboratory environment. The device is in the prototyping phase and will be modified prior to final compliance testing. … Users will connect their device to home WiFi networks and use Bluetooth to connect to other home electronics equipment. This line of testing will reveal real world engineering issues and reliability of networks. The device utilizes a standard WiFi/Bluetooth module, and the planned testing is not directed at evaluating the radio frequency characteristics of the module (which are known), but rather at the throughput and stability of the home WiFi networks that will support the device, as well as the basic functionality of the device. From this testing we hope to modify the design in order to maximize product robustness and user experience. Utilizing the requested number of units will allow testing of real world network performance and its impact on applications running on the device, so that any problems can be discovered and addressed promptly. (emphasis mine)

Google asked to test 252 devices between January 17 through July 17 in Mountain View,Calif.; New York, Cambridge, Mass. and Los Angeles. Its employees will have them, so maybe you can hit a Google employee’s home to watch the Super Bowl and then start sniffing around.

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• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
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An image from the SodaHead poll results (click to enlarge)

Facebook is in the process of converting all user profiles to the new Timeline design. But according to a new poll, the majority of people aren’t so keen on the new look.

70 percent of respondents to a poll of 1,900 people held by online opinion site SodaHead.com said they did not like the Timeline design, and that Facebook should get rid of it. Just 20 percent of respondents liked Timeline, and 10 percent said they did not have Facebook profiles.

And it turns out that the older people are, the less they like the new design: Only 10 percent of people over 65 liked Timeline, compared to 34 percent of people aged 18 to 24.

That won’t come as a big surprise to the folks at Facebook, since it lines up with the research the company itself did before Timeline was announced this past fall. At a press Q&A during the f8 conference in September, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that older users tended to respond more negatively to Timeline than younger ones. But, he said, that would not stop Facebook from making big changes: “The world is moving quickly, and we want to be innovative and try new things,” he said at the time.

Either way, it seems that Timeline is here to stay. With the Open Graph API, scores of third-party developers have invested significant time and money into building apps that work within the Timeline interface — so now it’s not just Facebook that’s tied to the new look, but an entire ecosystem of other companies. Besides, this is certainly not the first time Facebook users have reacted negatively to a change in the site’s look, and it seems that by now the people who run the social networking company have learned to ride out the initial jeers.

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• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
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• NewNet 2012: companies and technologies set to disrupt

As more authors choose to do an end-run around the traditional book business by going the self-publishing route, traditional publishers are finding it harder and harder to justify their existence. While some have risen to the industry’s defence — arguing that a good publisher helps refine a book, or acts as a curator by filtering out the lower-quality content — others are ready to do away with them altogether. In the latter group are authors like entrepreneur James Altucher, who argues that everyone needs to become a self-publisher, and J.A. Konrath, who says publishers are tied to a “broken, outdated and increasingly irrelevant business model.”

Altucher, who has been a financial analyst, a stock trader and founded several technology companies over the years, says that anyone who is in business or is a writer of any kind — including bloggers — should publish their own books. E-books are “the new business card,” he says. And why self-publish? Among other things, Altucher argues that the marketing value publishers provide is virtually wortheless, that writers have more control over their books and keep more of the revenue when they self-publish, and that author advances are going to zero as margins in the publishing industry come under pressure.

Konrath, meanwhile, hits many of the same points in his recent comments about the lack of value that publishers provide — especially for authors who already have an audience and are willing to design and promote their own books. Konrath made his comments in response to a profile of his former publisher, who he said were “dedicated, talented professionals” working in a broken and outdated industry.

Services publishers provide are increasingly unnecessary

Authors who have defended their publishers, including one we wrote about recently who made the decision not to self-publish her novel, argue that good publishers provide a number of services both for authors and for the book business in general — including the “curation” of new books, where publishers discard the dross and focus on the best. But Konrath says this is increasingly unnecessary:

Curation is no longer important. Readers are very capable of finding ebooks that interest them (the same way they can find YouTube videos, websites, and TV shows that interest them.) They no longer need to be told by a publisher, “This is worthy.” They can make that call on their own.

The author also notes that by acting as gatekeepers, publishers miss a lot of potentially good books — including his own. While his former publisher released one of his books in several countries, Konrath says they passed on two subsequent titles: the one that they promoted has made about $60,000 in three years, while the two that the publisher decided not to release have brought in four times that amount in just two years. Konrath and Altucher both note that traditional publishers still take a substantial proportion of the revenue from a book — over 50 percent in many cases — for doing relatively little. Says Konrath:

I understand Grand Central has overhead. But as an author, why should I care? I can hire out for editing, proofreading, formatting, and cover design, and those are fixed, sunk costs. Once those are paid, I can earn 70% on a self-pubbed ebook. Plus, I can set my own price. Lower prices sell more copies.

Publishers are still thinking like gatekeepers

Konrath also makes the point that many traditional publishers seem to spend most of their time trying to promote the sale of printed books, and as a result are distorting or not taking advantage of the market for e-books — including pricing them too high, as we’ve pointed out in the past. This kind of behavior, he says, feels more like an industry that is trying to protect its existing business model at the expense of its authors:

Originally, the purpose of a publisher was to connect writers with readers. Lately, publishers are more concerned with selling as many pieces of paper as possible. Ebooks are priced high to protect paper sales. The agency model was forced on Amazon is to protect paper sales. Windowing is to protect paper sales. If publishers truly wanted to connect writers and readers, there is no better way to do it than digitally.

We’ve written a number of times about the disruption the publishing business is undergoing, much of which is coming from Amazon — both through its Kindle-based self-publishing features, and through its increasingly aggressive moves to bolster its own status as a publisher, by signing authors like Tim Ferriss. Every few months there seems to be a new self-publishing success story, whether it’s young-adult author Amanda Hocking with her $2 million in revenue or million-selling author John Locke.

The main point both Altucher and Konrath are making, I think, is that traditional publishers who want to remain in business are going to have to reconsider a lot of fundamental aspects of their current model — including their existing fee structure — and try harder to make the case to authors that they serve a purpose at all. As Konrath says: “Writers are essential. Readers are essential. Publishers are not.” And if you are no longer essential to the process, your job just got a lot harder.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users David Daniels and Jeremy Mates

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• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
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The U.S. government has settled on Google’s Android platform for secure phones, mainly because the software is open and can easily be modified. CNN reported the news this morning, noting that Apple was asked to provide access to its code so the operating system could be modified specifically for secure government use. Apple declined to offer such access.

The modified Android software will be installed on commercially available handsets and can be used to support top-secret dispatches; something that the government doesn’t yet allow for. In the future, soldiers could use the handsets to locate other troops or quickly communicate orders to a group securely.

Ironically, the government group formed to manage the Android software project has already made a bold claim that makes the carriers look silly from where I stand.

Information-security director at George Mason University, Angelos Stavrou, is a contractor on the project and said when Google updates its Android software, an update to the secure Android phones can be ready within two weeks. Given that carriers can take 6 months or more to provide Android updates on some handsets, one of them should hire Stavrou away from this project!

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• 2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012

Ting, a new reseller of Sprint’s voice, 3G and WiMax services, launched this week with one of the most unique mobile plans to date. Much like large carrier family plans, Ting subscribers can share their voice minutes and text messages. But there’s a differentiating twist: Ting customers also share their monthly data across all devices on the plan.

The shared data component is exactly what I called for last year. I noted that household data plans are the next step for consumers, mainly because people are adding more connected screens and devices to their lifestyle. And different household members have different data needs; some use a little while others consume gobs of gigabytes. Why not average out the usage across multiple devices?

Tacking on a separate data plan for each device or family member simply isn’t efficient and the ability share a bucket of bytes across multiple devices is becoming more desirable. Both AT&T and Verizon have hinted at family data plans arriving as early as this year, but the devil’s in the details: We’ll have to see if the deck is stacked in favor of the carriers or the consumer. I anticipate the former, but I’ll wait to pass judgment.

Choosing a Ting plan appears simple with each plan sized like a pair of jeans ranging from XS to XXL for each service: voice minutes, text messages and data. Each device added to the plan costs $6 per month. As an example: three devices sharing 500 minutes, 2,000 text messages and 3 GB of data would cost $95 per month. That’s a total price for service on all three devices; not per device.

If you choose a plan size in a given month but actually use a smaller size, Ting will credit you the difference. Likewise, if you use more minutes, messages or data than your plan size allows, Ting will automatically bump you up to that plan charge. Your monthly bill may fluctuate as a result, but as Ting says, choosing the right plan isn’t too important due to this flexibility. There are clearly stated overages if you go beyond the XXL plan for any component.

Also of note is the inclusion of mobile hotspot functionality at no extra charge. Essentially, you can use your data on whatever device —  or devices — you want in any way you choose. This makes the plans very appealing by giving the consumer total control in data usage across devices.

There are no commitments for Ting and the device choices are fairly limited so far: A few smartphones, mobile hotspot devices and USB data sticks, but no tablets yet. And because there is no contract, Ting doesn’t heavily subsidize the hardware, meaning you’ll pay more for your device. But in the end, that may be a relatively small price to pay, given the freedom to share data across devices and no early termination fees.

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• LTE changes everything; LTE changes nothing
• Confused about the wireless markets? Here’s a breakdown
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis