Page 1 2 3 Page 1 2 3 | FRIDAY - APRIL 21, 2006 - ISSUE NO. 209 |
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| Wireless Messaging Newsletter | ||
| WIRELESS  MESSAGING | |
| EUROPEAN MOBILE MESSAGING ASSOCIATION |
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| EUROPEAN MOBILE MESSAGING ASSOCIATION |
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NEWS RELEASE April 14, 2006
As Tax Day Nears, Largent Renews Call for Scrapping Illegal Phone Tax WASHINGTON, DC – CTIA – The Wireless Association® President and CEO Steve Largent used the impending tax-filing deadline to reiterate the wireless industry's support for repealing the antiquated Federal Excise Tax (FET). The tax, first instituted in 1898 to finance the Spanish-American War, adds 3% to the monthly bill of every wireless user in America. Today, there are more than 212 million wireless subscribers in the nation. "Today's wireless user is buried under a heap of taxes and fees," said Largent. "The average wireless subscriber in America pays more than 17% of his or her monthly bill in taxes and fees. That's nothing short of outrageous. The fact that government is punishing citizens who choose to make their lives more productive, efficient and enjoyable through innovative wireless technology makes no sense at all." The Federal Excise Tax has been the target of numerous legal challenges over the past several years, and no fewer than three U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals have found the levy to be illegal. A report in today's Wall Street Journal suggests that federal government officials have decided to abandon their defense of the beleaguered tax and may be entertaining a tax-payer refund. "If the government has in fact decided to abandon their defense of the FET and is moving toward a full repeal and tax-payer refund, I congratulate and applaud their decision," continued Largent. "This would represent a significant and much needed tax cut for wireless users in America, and I encourage the federal government to move quickly in this direction."
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Source: Virtual Press Office
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USA Mobility's Wrong Numbers
As customers dwindle, the paging service must restate some of its accounting.
By Rich Duprey
Updated: 11:39 a.m. ET April 17, 2006
Paging industry leader USA Mobility (Nasdaq: USMO)—yes, there is still a paging industry, and there is a market leader -- announced two weeks ago that it wouldn't be filing its financial statements on time because of problems with how one of its predecessors accounted for income taxes and deferred tax assets. As is customary, the SEC threatened the company with a stock exchange delisting.
It's a little disturbing that the company didn't catch the snafu sooner. USA Mobility was created through a merger a little more than a year ago, when Motley Fool Hidden Gems selection Arch Wireless teamed up with Metrocall to form the nation's biggest paging service, with a 60% market share. The next-closest companies are Verizon Wireless (a Verizon (NYSE: VZ) joint venture) at 13% and SkyTel at 8%. Tiny Teletouch (AMEX: TLL) owns just 2% of the market.
With lawyers and accountants poring over the books before the deal connected, and the restatements stretching back as far as 2002, you'd think someone would have noticed that Arch Wireless was treating the items wrong. It's a disconcerting error, but since the treatments won't affect revenues or cash flows (they will impact depreciation and amortization), the company's overall condition probably won't change too much.
That's good news, considering that USA Mobility is leading the way in a declining industry. The results the pager company did release showed that its customer base continued to dwindle, albeit somewhat more slowly. In the first quarter of 2005, subscribers eroded at a rate of 22.7%; by the fourth quarter, USA Mobility stemmed the rate of hemorrhaging to just 20.3%. In other words, it couldn't do much to cauterize the flow of customers fleeing paging. USA Mobility has 4.9 million customers, a little more than one-third of the 7.7 million customers the two separate companies had in 2003.
Revenue per unit, or RPU, also continued to decline, but there may be a silver lining here. While customers continue to leave paging, they are doing so at slower rates, and they're leaving behind those customers—health care professionals, government workers, and various large corporate clients—for whom paging remains essential. Customers who did leave tended to have higher RPU costs than those remaining -- but that's understandable, since a paging service's biggest customers can generally command multiyear, multiunit discounts.
The top five industries that USA Mobility serves account for 60% of the company's revenues. Management can't presently say whether defections will ever drop precipitously, allowing the company to stabilize or even raise its rates. (Understandably, it doesn't want to alienate its remaining customers.) USA Mobility does see trends leading in that direction, but no one knows whether that stabilization will happen soon enough.
There's only so much duplicate service and expense the company can cut, and right now, those cutbacks haven't surpassed the loss of revenues from departing customers. USA Mobility still makes a ton of cash from the business—it was able to pay off the loan needed to complete the merger in just a year's time, and subsequently rebuild its coffers—but that can go on only for so long.
Last year, I calculated that with the stock trading at around $31 a share, it was richly priced. I estimated that a 33% drop might make it fairly valued, and a plunge of 50% or more would give me a margin of safety to consider picking up shares. Since that time, the stock is only off by 25%. In the Hidden Gems Daily Updates fellow Fool Bill Barker warns that the company exhibits many of the dangers of a classic value trap, trading at cheap valuations all the way to oblivion.
Yet there may be a few silver linings here. The hurricanes that devastated the South last year proved the value of the paging system. Where land- or cell-based phone systems were literally underwater, USA Mobility's paging system was virtually unaffected. That just might prompt a number of customers to hang on to their pagers, and might attract a number of new clients. I'm not ready to proclaim the company a value trap yet.
USA Mobility trades at an apparent discount, and it doesn't appear that its business will vanish any time soon. Even so, I'd be hard-pressed to want to pick up its shares right now.
Fool contributor Rich Duprey does not own any of the stocks mentioned in this article. You can see his holdings here. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Source: The Motley Fool
SMS does SOS
Short Message Service earns valued role as a link of last resort for crisis communications
| 4 tips for making the most of text messaging | |
Incorporating the use of Short Message Service communications in disaster planning doesn't always require massive cellular phone purchases. Here are some tips for making the most of mobile communications devices you already have on hand. 1. Assemble a list of cell phone numbers for critical personnel so employees can send text messages during emergencies. 2. Encourage workers to become comfortable with text messaging, which can be cumbersome and frustrating, especially for older employees. 3. Establish communications relay teams in which individuals practice using SMS to organize others. 4. Develop a series of standard messages and responses that can make logistics and coordination faster and easier during crises. — Jennifer McAdams | |
| BlackBerry’s back channel | |
It’s possible that a crisis could render useless mobile devices such as Research in Motion’s BlackBerry, the handheld electronic messaging system that relies on data center-bound e-mail servers that a disaster could disable. Therefore, RIM has introduced a new feature for its devices called PIN-to-PIN messaging. It allows one BlackBerry user to exchange messages with another by using the personal identification number of the other device as an address instead of the recipient’s e-mail address, bypassing the e-mail gateway. “Like SMS, PIN-to-PIN works on the packet side of the network,” said Alan Panezic, director of RIM’s BlackBerry Solutions Group. Panezic said that RIM developed the PIN-to-PIN capability in response to government requests for a more secure way to communicate in crisis situations if critical enterprise servers are down. “This has been very much a concerted effort for us, especially in the federal space, where departments want to get very organized and be able to communicate quickly during disasters,” Panezic said. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is one of the agencies exploring the use of PIN-to-PIN communications, said Barry West, FEMA’s chief information officer. NASA officials have also expressed interest. — Jennifer McAdams |
Thursday, April 20, 2006
By Jennifer McAdams
U.S. Coast Guard Capt. Joseph Castillo couldn't shake a nagging thought while in a post-Hurricane Katrina meeting. News accounts of a downed orange helicopter would cause his wife to fear the worst. Hastily, he composed a text message—no more than the 160 characters possible in a Short Message Service (SMS) exchange between cell phones. Relieved that his family knew he was alive, Castillo returned to the business of coordinating airlifts for stranded hurricane victims.
Serendipitously, SMS proved during Katrina that teenagers desperate to stay in constant contact with classmates where not the only users of the technology.
Coast Guard officials used the technology to direct life-saving helicopter rescues. Gulf Coast ambulance drivers used cell phones and pagers to send text messages to area hospitals about the status of incoming patients.
When disaster strikes, SMS has a major advantage over cellular voice calls and wireless e-mail devices. Text messages do not rely on voice channels for transmission, and they don’t piggyback on enterprise e-mail servers. Instead, SMS messages travel as small packets of data on a wireless carrier’s control channel, the same portion of the spectrum that keeps a cellular network apprised of a particular phone’s location and status.
Because SMS messages are isolated in the control channel and are often unfazed by heavy traffic or adverse conditions that can overwhelm wireless networks, text messages can get through when most other methods of communication fail. Hence, some government officials are beginning to build SMS use into disaster planning exercises.
“During Hurricane Katrina, we used SMS to get people to where we needed them to be,” Castillo said. “Now we are including use of the technology not only in our hurricane planning but in all of our disaster plans.”
In addition, Castillo realizes that this simple communication tool can make a major difference for any government employee faced with the personal and logistical issues involved in functioning in the immediate aftershocks of disaster.
“My wife knew I was flying in a lot of helicopters, and there was no way to assuage her” fears, he said. “Often in a crisis, several hours can pass with no way to let others know that your cell phone is working.”
Because SMS is often reliable in the wake of disasters when other communications fail, officials at agencies or departments not on the front lines of disaster recovery may find themselves and their employees turning to text messaging, should worst-case scenarios materialize.
“We can extrapolate from the number of consumer users that even if this is not a blessed mode of communication, it is now one that people are aware of,” said Charles Golvin, principal analyst at Forrester Research. “It also seems to be one they can rely on during times of emergency.”
Still, most emergency response officials seem ready to give SMS an official place in disaster drills at this point. “SMS is most valuable because of the ability to receive simple text messages identifying the nature of the event,” said Thomas Newell, facilities engineer at Michigan State Police’s Emergency Management Division. “It is also a quick way to get information out to many responders.”
Michigan’s use of SMS is blended with extensive reliance on an enterprise-wide communication software platform designed to blast notifications to frontline responders and enable two-way communication through the State Emergency Operations Center. The effort includes use of text-enabled pagers and wireless devices such as Research in Motion’s BlackBerry, which depend on Michigan’s Simple Mail Transfer Protocol e-mail gateway.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is also looking at formalizing the use of SMS in crisis situations. “Currently, FEMA does not employ the use of SMS technology within the enterprise. As with a large number of federal agencies, FEMA uses BlackBerry wireless devices as the primary form of mobile communications,” said Barry West, FEMA’s chief information officer. “But we are currently evaluating SMS messaging as an alternate means of communication in the event the exchange servers or network is unavailable.”
Despite anecdotal reports of SMS dependability during disasters, some government officials do not consider this consumer-centric technology suitable for official deployment.
“We do not feel SMS is a viable communications vehicle. Therefore, we have not deployed the technology,” said Otto Doll, CIO and commissioner at South Dakota’s Bureau of Information and Telecommunications.
Accidental medium Most people discovered SMS reliability in times of crisis by accident. “We had not originally planned to use SMS as a primary means of communication,” said John Lawson, former CIO at Tulane University. “Essentially, we just thought, ‘Oh well, we'll just try to send a text message,’ upon finding that we could not make voice calls or send e-mails.”
When Katrina’s wrath kicked into full gear, Tulane was evacuated except for the university’s president, chief financial officer and a skeleton support staff. Voice communication failed just as Lawson and others decided to end e-mail service and close Tulane’s data center entirely. “That’s why SMS proved so valuable. It allowed us to stay in communication with those still there,” he said.
Tulane’s executive staff relied on SMS mostly to relay logistical messages — a core strength of the technology, because text messages are severely limited in length. “Most of the messages I recall were vital in nature. Mostly, they were about how to get the president and the rest of the team out,” Lawson said.
Tulane officials who remained at the university managed to use SMS to feed information to the university’s already evacuated public relations employees, who then took this information and composed messages of reassurance to worried parents and others.
“We wanted to make sure students, faculty, parents and all of our constituents were aware of what was going on at the school,” Lawson said. “So we were posting messages on our Web site based on SMS messages we were getting from the president. However, it was difficult because of the compressed length of the message and our realization that it was important to capture the essence of what he wanted to say.”
Text messaging excels in situations that require the briefest of updates.
“SMS addresses the need to transmit specific and actionable data, such as damage assessments, medical updates and continuity-of-operations plans,” said Matt Foosaner, director of Sprint Nextel’s Emergency Response Team.
Another SMS feature that becomes powerful during disasters is the fact that the messages will sit in a queue if not sent immediately. “Because of this, you have a better chance of getting through than you do with voice calls, simply because you don’t have to keep manually re-dialing,” Golvin said. “The network will continue to attempt to make the connection.”
SMS also proves its practicality in times of disaster, because it is a minimalist technology. “SMS strengths include simplicity,” said Bruce Deer, president of paging giant SkyTel, which outfitted a New Orleans ambulance company that used SMS to communicate with hospitals. “Support of these networks is lower due to smaller logistical needs, such as less fuel for generators and more coverage area per transmission site.”
McAdams is a freelance writer based in Vienna, Va.
Source: FCW.com
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Understanding Marketing Psychology and the Halo Effect
What Apple's iPod and Motorola's Razr Can Teach Us
By Al Ries
Published: April 17, 2006
Marketing and psychology are closely related. If psychology is the "systematic study of human behavior," then marketing is the "systematic study of human behavior in the marketplace."
 After broad marketing campaigns heavily focused on a single product—the iPod—Apple's overall fiscal 2005 sales were up 68%, profits were up 384%, and the company stock had jumped 177%. |
The halo effect
Good-looking people, for example, tend to be perceived as more intelligent, more successful and more popular. That's the halo effect in psychology.
The halo effect also works in marketing. What's behind the phenomenal success of Apple Computer? In a word, the iPod.
In fiscal 2005, Apple Computer sales were up 68% over the previous year. Profits were up 384%. And the stock was up 177%. And Apple's net profit margin increased from 3.3% to 9.6%, an astonishing jump.
The good news from Apple Computer wasn't just the success of the iPod. As a matter of fact, in fiscal 2005, the iPod and iTunes together accounted for only 39% of Apple's sales. The other 61% of Apple (computers, software and services) also did well.
Apple's computer and related businesses were up 27% in fiscal 2005 over the previous year. And, according to industry reports, Apple increased its share of the personal computer market from 3% to 4%. That's the halo effect in marketing.
73.9% market share
During the year, Apple bombarded the public with TV advertising, print ads and billboards touting its iPod. Very effectively, too. Apple share of the digital music market is 73.9%. The iPod brand is so dominant that almost nobody knows which brand is in second place. (For the record, it's iRiver with a miniscule 4.8% share.)
What about the marketing support for Apple's line of personal computers? The company can't have spent very much. I can't remember seeing a Macintosh advertisement during the year, can you?
Which is exactly the point. Apple put the bulk of its marketing budget behind the iPod creating a halo effect that helped the entire Apple product line.
Motorola has done something similar by putting its emphasis on its Razr line of cellphones. In the third quarter of last year, for example, Motorola shipped 38.7 million cellphones. Revenues for the quarter were up 26%.
But only 6.5 million, or 17% of those cellphones, were Razr phones. Obviously the Razr became a halo for the rest of the line.
Go with your best horse
Focusing your marketing message on a single word or concept has been our mantra for years. But taking this idea one step further can also produce dramatic results. To cut through the clutter in today's over-communicated society, place your marketing dollars on your best horse. Then let that product or service serve as a halo effect for the rest of the line.
Not an easy idea to sell in the boardroom. "What? You want to spend most of the marketing budget on a product that accounts for only 39% of our sales?" (It's even worse than that. Presumably Apple Computer's 2005 marketing budget was prepared in 2004 when iPod and iTunes accounted for only 19% of sales.)
One of the best examples of the halo effect is Sirius Satellite Radio and Howard Stern. Sirius has 120 channels, but they promote only the shock jock. Results have been phenomenal. The day they announced the hiring of Stern in 2004, Sirius had just 660,000 subscribers. Today they have 3.3 million.
Stern is not for everybody. Probably half of the new Sirius subscribers will never listen to his channel. But the focus on Stern has generated enormous PR and created a halo over the entire satellite radio system. (Much like the effect "The Sopranos" has had on HBO.)
Halo effect in marketing history
The halo effect has a long history in marketing. In 1930, Michael Cullen created the first supermarket chain which he called "King Kullen." His breakthrough idea was his method of pricing. He decided to price 300 items at cost. Another 300 items barely above cost. And the remaining 600 or so items at very healthy margins.
Guess which items he chose to advertise? The ones he sold at cost. What you advertise and what you make money on can be two different things. Virtually every principle of psychology has an application in marketing. Take "imprinting," for example.
The first brand in a new category will imprint itself in human minds as the original, the authentic, the real thing. Kleenex in tissue. Hertz in rent-a-cars. Heinz in ketchup. Starbucks in coffee shops.
The study of marketing begins with the study of psychology. Al Ries is the author or co-author of 11 books on marketing, including his latest, The Origin of Brands. He and his daughter Laura run the Atlanta-based marketing strategy firm Ries & Ries. Their website: www.ries.com.
Source: Advertising Age
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