Wireless access is the top customer demand of hotel guests in their rooms and throughout the hotel properties, according to a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Motorola Solutions (www.motorolasolutions.com) in April 2013.

This survey includes responses from 500 North American hotel guests, including business and recreational travelers. Among the findings:


° 90% wished hotels offered WiFi as an amenity, making it the top priority of both business and recreational travelers.

° More than 90% of hotel guests surveyed indicated they wanted WiFi in their hotel rooms, not just in common areas.

° 40% of business travelers said they would not stay at a hotel without Internet.

Mosa Motion Graphics has introduced Clips 3D for iMovie and FCPX 1.0 for Mac OS X.

Clips 3D dispenses 36 different exciting animated 3D HD clips. Videos can be dragged out of Clips 3D right onto an iMovie or Final Cut Pro X shot collection "event." The video clip immediately appears in the project.

Clips 3D's iPad like interface sits atop your editing program. Its royalty free content makes this helper application a great production tool for video makers. The Clips 3D library is sorted into four categories: Illusion, Physical, SiFi and Simulated.

Clips 3D for iMovie and FCPX supplies royalty free animations that are otherwise, difficult to create. These animations are useful as title backgrounds, transitions, credit rolls -- or simply as eye candy.

The Clips 3D application contains a pictorial help file, and a help video for easy learning. Shots are up to 30 seconds in duration, and are 720P HD, at 30 FPS, MP4-H.264 .MOV files. Clips 3D videos are...

New data from the IDC research group (www.idc.com) showed first quarter 2013 (1Q13) videoconferencing equipment revenue declined 13.2% year over year and 21.9% quarter over quarter. Total worldwide enterprise videoconferencing and telepresence equipment revenue was US$563.4 million in 1Q13, its worst result since the second quarter of 2010, according to IDC.

From a market segment perspective, endpoints, which include multi-codec immersive telepresence, single-codec telepresence, and personal videoconferencing, declined 10.7% year over year and video network infrastructure decreased 20.5% year over year in 1Q13.

Regionally, Latin America declined just 3.5% year over year, followed by the 9.1% year-over-year decline in Asia/Pacific and the 10.1% decrease in Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). North America was a particular area of weakness this quarter with its 20.3% year-over-year drop.

"Videoconferencing...

IDC (www.idc.com) has released the latest forecast from the Worldwide Semiannual Software Tracker. For 2012, the worldwide software market grew 3.6% year over year, less than half the growth rate experienced in 2010 and 2011.

The research group believes these results mark the beginning of a more conservative period of growth. The forecast growth rate for 2013 is 5.7% while the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for the 2012-2017 forecast period is 6.3%.

The collaborative applications software category is forecast to have the highest growth in the short term (2013). This category includes social software, which is growing from a lower revenue base. The collaborative applications category is also experiencing more cloud deployments than other categories and this represents new software investments.

The structured data management software category is expected to show the strongest growth over the five-year...

The worldwide software market grew 3.6% year over year in 2012, less than half the growth rate experienced in 2010 and 2011, according to the "International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Semiannual Software Tracker."

Although some deceleration was expected, the economic contraction in the mature markets of Western Europe and Japan played a determinant role in the overall market performance, according to the research group. Meanwhile, the emerging markets of Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa (CEMA), Latin America, and Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan, Australia, and New Zealand) enjoyed year-over-year growth of 7.2% in 2012. This was the fourth consecutive year of solid growth in these emerging markets, enabling them to collectively gain more than two points of worldwide market share over this period.

Mature markets still represent more than 85% of the worldwide software opportunity, but in recent years the strong growth in these emerging markets has...

By Rick Sutcliffe

When all is said and done with the usual caveat that most is said and little done, people make decisions with their emotions and guts, not their brains. This has been noted here before in connection with the stock market and the purchase of cheap imitation PCs (rather than the real thing -- Macs).

Last month's Provincial election here in British Columbia illustrates the same principle in the practice of politics. (Note: in Canada, municipal, Provincial, and Federal elections are independent of one another both in timing and in party affiliations.) A tired, scandal-ridden, and seemingly unpopular Liberal government (no connection with the Federal party of the same name) was running for a re-election the pundits universally thought a cakewalk for the socialist opposition.

A new Conservative party would split the free-enterprise vote, they opined, and the NDP (New Democrat Party) would win a landslide. Every "professional"...

Customers are in the midst of a total mobile mind shift. They're not interested in brand messaging or logos; they want utility -- and they want it now.

New Forrester data (www.forrester.com) shows that 22% of US online adults are far along in this shift, connecting everywhere, frequently, on multiple devices. For marketers, meeting the needs of this demanding customer base in a mobile setting is a marketing imperative.

In a new Forrester report that debuted at the annual Forrester Marketing Forum in LA, Analyst Melissa Parrish detailed marketing strategy for the mobile mind shift. She notes it will depend on the frequency of brand/customer interactions and the quality of the experience of these interactions. For instance, brands that offer high-quality, frequent interactions (think Starbucks, Disney), should expand their customer relationships by rolling out new mobile features. Brands with low-quality...

ABI Research’s (www.abiresearch.com) latest mobile Internet pricing tracker reinforces the notion that there are essentially five mobile Internet pricing models in operation: the Tiered Usage Pricing Plan; the All You Can Eat Data Plan; the Unlimited Plan with Speed Restriction; the Data Surfing Time Plan; and the Multi-device Shared Plan.

Although much talked about, Multi-device Shared Plans are relatively novel with approximately only 5% of mobile subscribers having the option to subscribe to Multi-device Shared Plans. Of the addressable market, 15% can choose from All You Can Eat Data plans, but 66% only have recourse to the traditional Tiered

"Mobile operators should be prepared to adopt novel pricing models in order to boost subscriber adoption and therefore incremental revenue. Multi-device Shared Plans have helped operators like Verizon in the US to boost revenue per account," says Jake...

The global tablet applications processor market showed an impressive 83% year-on-year growth in 2012 to reach US$2.7 billion, according to Strategy Analytics (www.strategyanalytics.com).

The research group notes that Apple continued its dominance in the tablet applications processor market with 48% revenue share in 2012. NVIDIA, Texas Instruments, Samsung and Qualcomm made up the rest of the top-five vendors. Strategy Analytics identified that a handful of Chinese tablet chip vendors captured 20 % volume share between them.

"NVIDIA led the non-iPad tablet market with 27% revenue share in 2012," says Sravan Kundojjala, senior analyst, Strategy Analytics. "NVIDIA scored high-profile design-wins such as the Google Nexus 7 and Microsoft Surface RT, which fueled 83 percent year-on-year growth in its tablet applications processor shipments in 2012. Strategy Analytics states that NVIDIA is well-...

Parks Associates (www.parksassociates.com) estimates that mobile app revenues in the U.S. and Canada will reach nearly US$22 billion in 2017, fueled mainly by in-app purchases and in-app advertising revenues.

"Tablet owners show a greater tendency than smartphone users to make in-app purchases, with more than 20% having upgraded from a free to a paid version of an app," said Harry Wang, Health & Mobile Product Research, Parks Associates. "The mobile app market has entered a new, more mature stage where companies need to employ precise segmentation and deployment strategies in order to generate consumer interest and realize successful monetization."

Apps are also increasingly becoming embedded in real world objects - with companies such as Johnson Controls wiring commercial buildings, or Samsung launching Android-controlled fridges, adds Steve Willmott, CEO of 3scale. "his shift begins to...

ABI Research's (www.abiresearch.com) latest data on the Internet of Everything (IoE) shows that there are more than 10 billion wirelessly connected devices in the market today; with over 30 billion devices expected by 2020.

"The emergence of standardized ultra-low power wireless technologies is one of the main enablers of the IoE, with semiconductor vendors and standards bodies at the forefront of the market push, helping to bring the IoE into reality," says Peter Cooney, practice director. "The year 2013 is seen by many as the year of the Internet of Everything, but it will still be many years until it reaches its full potential. The next five years will be pivotal in its growth and establishment as a tangible concept to the consumer.”

Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, ZigBee, Cellular, RFID, and many other wireless technologies are all important to drive Internet of Everything growth. The long term expansion of...

4G networks are launching fast and moving to a flat and distributed hierarchy. Dictated by performance needs, data management is moving closer to the network edge, according to new data from ABI Research (www.abiresearch.com).

This evolution of the network from a centralized data center to a distributed architecture, can be thought of as a "data center without walls," according to the research group. The historical paradigm for mobile networks is the hierarchical and centralized core network.

The advent of 3G and 4G mobile broadband greatly increases the data traffic to the IP Network and Internet point of presence, says ABI Research. This gives rise to the specialist DPI and Optimization firms, such as Allot and Sandvine, who prosper with high performance, purpose built custom hardware that sits in the data stream for inspection and management.

The major infrastructure vendors, such as...