CorraoGroup Blog

Smart phones, which can surf the Internet, e-mail photos and do other computer-like functions, are still only about one-quarter of the overall cell phone market worldwide. But they have been growing fast as consumers trade up from less-capable voice and text phones. IDC estimates that smart phone shipments will top 269 million this year, up from 173.5 million in 2009.

For the first six months of this year, smart phone makers shipped 119 million phones, up 55 percent from the first half of 2009, according to IDC.
But HTC and Motorola — both of which use Google’s Android  operating system for their phones — made the most gains in the second quarter compared with the first quarter, said Llamas. HTC’s U.S. market share climbed from 8.9 percent to 14.2 percent. Motorola rose from 12.9 percent to 14.2 percent.

Android is the wild card, deserving close observation for the rest of this year and years to come.  As HTC and Motorola have leapt out in front with their own respective (Android-based) devices, others such as Dell, Kyocera, LG Electronics and Samsung will soon help grow the number of Android phones on store shelves.”

The net for all businesses is to be connect and marketing to smartphone users as this will be device of choice going forward.

Motorola’s co-CEO Sanjay Jha said June 9 the phone maker is building a new Android phone with a 2GHz processor. That’s double the speed of the Nexus One, HTC Droid Incredible and HTC Evo 4G smartphones currently on the market. Jha also said Motorola will feature include two to four new phones with front-facing cameras that could be used for video conferencing, similar to what the Evo 4G offers and what the iPhone 4 will feature.

I’m not going to analyze the definition of “Cloud Applications” related to hardware & software requirements or the perception that this technology is new to the market. What I would like to address is why companies are starting to purchase these solutions.

The maturity of cloud-based applications combined with increased networks performance and security has provided any business owner options for how they can  manage their digital information. It has become very compelling to outsource this requirement and regard this service as an utility bill. The initial cost and learning curve is minimal allowing most business owners to focus on their core competency.  Another factor to consider is new Cloud2-base systems allow integrated social media feedback to your organization, providing a compelling case for increased customer satisfaction and shorter sales cycles. Even Verizon is getting into Cloud business.

In the end, you will probably see a blend for Cloud-based solutions with traditional internal proprietary solutions. Understanding what is best for you requires long-term planning and assessment of internal budget and resources required to properly manage in regards to your business needs.

In today’s volatile and highly competitive business environment, the risks of poor decision making are greater than ever. Business leaders must make the right judgments about market direction, the competitive landscape, and investments in products, technologies and people to survive. When decisions are made without a proper understanding of the risks, potential obstacles and underlying assumptions, the bottom-line costs can be tremendous. While difficult to determine an exact dollar value, consider the wider impact of poor decision making –

• That jeopardize your reputation with customers;
• The cost of missed opportunities when no (or delayed) decision-making occurs, hoping the human talent you have will eventually get better;
• The cost of misusing the limited human resources that exist by misplacing responsibility and accountability with under-qualified or under-performing staff.

Strong leaders not only make better decisions themselves, but also help attract other high-performing team members that think and act decisively. Together, these talented people demand the best from each other and improve overall decision making.
The more talented people you have on your team, the more (and better) talent you attract and retain. When teams have the right match of talent to business needs, there can be amazing results. Good judgment, objective decision making, and consistent action leads to exceptional results. A team of high performers who are clear about the company’s vision and direction create energy and the belief that there is nothing they can’t accomplish. By contrast, ignoring talent deficiencies in your team drains energy, negatively impacts productivity, creates a lack of respect in leadership capabilities, and often results in high performers leaving for better opportunities.
Decisive leaders are clear about the knowledge, skills and abilities that they need, and are always assessing the talent they have, making course corrections and filling the gaps to maintain a consistent level of high performance. If you don’t take the time and effort to make good decisions, you will always be catching your breath, and always chasing instead of leading the competition.

The University of California-San Diego has just published the annual “How Much Information” report, which details how much data that we consumed in 2008.  A full copy of the report is available here.

The sheer numbers never fail to surprise me, although I guess I shouldn’t be.  The report says we, as Americans, went through an average of about 34 gigabytes of data every day, ranging from “old” media (like newspapers and books) to “new” media (like satellite or Internet radio and web-based games).  And the report doesn’t even include data that we consume at work.

So where is the data coming from?  Almost 55% of the data comes from Americans playing streaming computer games, according to the report.  TV accounts for another 35%, with everything else accounting for the remaining 10% or so.  In all, the UCSD report says about 3.6 zettabytes of data was consumed last year, 12 times the amount estimated in an IDC report two years ago.  Put into perspective, a zettabyte is a million million gigabytes.   Put another way, if you took every home computer in the state of Minnesota, multiplied that amount 1,000 times, then multiplied that number by another 3.5…you’d get some idea of the amount of information and storage we’re talking about.

As professionals, we need to pay careful attention to these numbers:  customers are increasingly demanding information that’s delivered to them via the Internet, and delivered real-time with no interruption.  And when they want to save that information, they want a reliable place to save it.  (We are, you know, saving everything:  it wasn’t too long ago that terabytes were spoken of in hushed, reverential terms.  Now, you can buy a 1TB external drive for less than $100.)

The lessons are pretty clear.  The concept of Moore’s Law is alive and well in terms of escalating data usage.  Those companies that fail to understand this, and plan for it, risk being left behind in short order.  Storage hardware and software companies need to plan, of course, but so do networking companies, and Internet providers, and content providers like TV stations and newspapers (yes, newspapers), and customers who’ll ultimately consume all this information.