Ones and Zeros
A look at the year's technology statistics reveals one clear trend: There were no small movements. Many tech companies not only got back on their feet, but also charged ahead, while consumers reacted to challenges, such as the continued flood of spam, as well as opportunities, like number portability. Moreover, cameraphones, plasma TV and other dazzling devices had many consumers swooning over consumer electronics again.
Here are tallies on spam, PC sales, online dating and more.
Keeping Your Digits
The most closely watched number for 2003 turned out to be a 10-digit beauty we all tend to be protective of. The passage of new phone number portability rules allowed cellphone users to switch carriers without getting a new number, and let land-line customers cut the cord and transfer their home numbers to cellphones.
Phone companies feared a flood of defections, but so far, that hasn't happened. Only about one in eight people planned to take advantage of portability and switch carriers, according to a November Gallup poll. Just 5% planned to ditch their land lines in favor of cellphones, though that still represents enough customers to make the Baby Bells sweat. Some 67% of U.S. adults now own a cellphone, up from less than 50% three years ago.
Also dissuading potential switchers is the continued problems carriers are having with "porting" numbers. Consumers lodged more than 600 complaints in the first two weeks of portability, the Federal Communications Commission reported12, with AT&T Wireless Services drawing the most.
Meanwhile, camera phones have become one of the fastest-growing consumer electronics devices of all time, says research firm IDC. About 57 million of the devices will be sold this year, nearly triple the number sold last year. Also on the rise: So-called smart phones that integrate personal digital assistants. IDC expects 8.6 million smart phones to ship this year, up from 3.6 million last year.
Hip to Be Flat
This year was the year of the flat-panel screen, from computer monitors to 64" plasma televisions no thicker than a deck of cards.
Gateway's plasma televisions have been selling particularly well.
Shipments of flat panels nearly tripled to 1.87 million in 2003, according to IDC, and that number is expected to rise 95% in 2004. Two big reasons for the gains: ramped-up production capacity, and tumbling prices. The average price on a plasma TV was $3,572 in 2003, well below the $5,039 average from last year. Several new players entered the market, including computer maker Gateway Inc., whose sub-$3,000 plasma was one of the year's top sellers.
Consumer-electronics sales also got a big jolt from portable-music players. A half dozen companies -- including Gateway and Dell Inc. -- introduced clones of Apple Computer Inc.'s popular iPod. Shipments of portable-audio players surged 43% in 2003, and are expected to rise another 35% in 2004.
Business Is Booming
The all-important "Black Friday" shopping day after Thanksgiving was a success for online retailers. Traffic jumped by 187% on that day from the previous week, according to Nielsen//NetRatings, with a significant chunk of the traffic coming from Web sites for brick-and-mortar retailers. Sites that hawk consumer electronics saw the biggest gains in traffic, while traffic for books, music and videos actually decreased slightly.
Computer makers are also breathing easier. PC sales for the holiday shopping season could be up by as much as 19%, according to market-watcher NPD Group. That would mark the first increase since 1999.
And there's more good news heading into next year: Spending on information technology is expected to rise solidly in 2004, driven by retail companies. More than a quarter of retailers say their technology budgets will grow by at least 10% next year, according to a survey by Forrester Research, with most of that money going for electronic-commerce initiatives like Internet stores and stand-alone kiosks. Still, IT professionals shouldn't celebrate just yet. Just over half of the firms surveyed said they plan to move IT activities offshore, where labor is considerably cheaper, while 67% said they plan to "look seriously" at outsourcing.
Spam Keeps Flowing
Spam remained a major headache for Internet users, with little relief in sight. Some 56% of all messages sent in November were spam, up from 42% at the beginning of the year and just 8% two years ago, according to antispam software maker Brightmail Inc. Product pitches represented the biggest piece of the onslaught, followed by ads for financial services and adult products. A controversial effort to fight spam cleared Congress13 and appears headed for White House approval. Critics question the feasibility of enforcing the bill's mandate for a do-not-spam registry.
Who's Online?
Not surprisingly, the Internet audience continued to grow in 2003, with the total number of users rising about 5% to more than 136 million, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. More surprising: Senior citizens made up the fastest-growing group of online users, surging 25% to 9.6 million (55-to-64-year-olds came in next, with 15% growth).
TABS ON TECH
Dating sites were all the rage in 2003. Yahoo Personals was the most popular, followed by Match.com and AmericanSingles.com. Newcomer Friendster didn't crack the top five for traffic, but trounced the competition in terms of time spent on the site. Users spent an average of almost two hours on the site in October, compared with 35 minutes for Yahoo Personals and just under an hour for Match.com.
The use of modem connections to get online continued to shrink, though new "accelerators" offered by several major Internet service providers stemmed some defections to broadband. Still, broadband use is gaining fast: There were almost 39 million users of high-speed Internet connections in 2003, up nearly 50% from the previous year.
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