January 2012

Verizon Communications said profit margins for its wireless venture dropped in the fourth quarter due to record high sales of the Apple iPhone, the popular smartphone that typically costs more for carriers to buy than other handsets.

Verizon Wireless -- co-owned by Verizon Communications and Vodafone Group PLC -- sold 4.2 million iPhones in last year's final three months, Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo said. That was more than double the two million iPhones activated in the third quarter. Verizon and rival AT&T had said third-quarter iPhone sales were slower because of customers waiting to buy the newest version of the device, resulting in pent-up demand. Apple released its latest-version smartphone, known as the iPhone 4S, in mid-October on the three largest carriers including Sprint Nextel. The iPhone has become increasingly vital to Apple's profits. With sales of $47.1 billion, the device accounted for 43% of the Cupertino, Calif., company's revenue in its fiscal 2011, up from 39% the year before.

After the quadrennial US election ritual of polls, caucuses and primaries began in Iowa, filling television, tablet and smartphone screens with instant punditry, one group of executives should be watching what unfolds between now and November carefully.

Media and marketing have always been heavily influenced by elections. There is the obvious boost to advertising revenues: Morgan Stanley analysts expect that half of this year’s growth in US ad spending will come from campaign money, double the impact of the Olympic Games. Moody’s estimates that political ad revenues could be up 9-18 per cent this year from 2010. News organizations hope, too, for a lift as they unveil this season’s gimmicks and multimedia advances. (CNN used holographic “Weebles” to illustrate how caucuses work, while the Washington Post is scouring Twitter to measure the mood.) More important, though, is the impact on marketing. Madison Avenue often hires campaign veterans and watches elections obsessively for insights into how big corporate campaigns should be run or troubleshooting tactics PR firms can use. For first-time candidates, election campaigns are like product launches. For incumbent presidents, they can be tricky rebranding campaigns. Early primary states are like test markets for tactics that also reflect and accentuate bigger shifts shaping the media of the day.

[Commentary] Chattanooga, a city of 170,000 persons, has the fastest Internet service in the United States. Every residence and business in a 600 square mile area has access to fiber optic Internet with symmetrical speeds up to one gigabit per second.

This Internet service is not offered by one of the major telcos and is not part of Google's gigabit Ethernet project. Rather, the service is offered by the municipal electric power company, EPB (formerly the Electric Power Board), which installed the fiber as part of its smart grid electric power management plan. EPB has no shareholders. They're not in the business of creating profit. They're in the business of serving the public. The breadth of this vision comes to life when you realize that EPB's fiber optic Internet extends to residents of trailer parks as well as to some of the farms in areas surrounding Chattanooga. If you live in a trailer park in EPB's service area, you can sign up for gigabit Ethernet with a static IP address. The cost? Less than you'd pay for a T1 line in any other city in the nation. And this is symmetrical gigabit Ethernet – more than 600 times faster than a T1 line.

At a time when Washington and Europe are praising Turkey as the model of Muslim democracy for the Arab world, Turkish human rights advocates say a recent crackdown is part of an ominous trend.

Most worrying, they say, are fresh signs that the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is repressing freedom of the press through a mixture of intimidation, arrests and financial machinations, including the sale in 2008 of a leading newspaper and a television station to a company linked to the prime minister’s son-in-law. The arrests threaten to darken the image of Mr. Erdogan, who is lionized in the Middle East as a powerful regional leader who can stand up to Israel and the West. Widely credited with taming Turkey’s military and forging a religiously conservative government that marries strong economic growth with democracy and religious tolerance, he has proved prickly and thin-skinned on more than one occasion. It is that sensitivity bordering on arrogance, human rights advocates say, that contributes to his animus against the news media. There are now 97 members of the news media in jail in Turkey, including journalists, publishers and distributors, according to the Turkish Journalists’ Union, a figure that rights groups say exceeds the number detained in China. The government denies the figure and insists that with the exception of four cases, those arrested have all been charged with activities other than reporting.