The spinning wheel, the ticking clock or the hourglass - a familiar icon for waiting is now a pervasive theme for a culture that increasingly relies on digital processors in daily activities. The Intel Corporation has coined a new term in technology: the “Hourglass Syndrome,” not a real syndrome or medical condition but “a term coined by Intel to describe the situation that many consumers face while waiting for their technology to keep up with the speed of life,” as covered in PCB007’s coverage of their new findings.

A July 2010 technology online study conducted by Harris Interactive and sponsored by Intel, documented just how commonly computer users lose their patience:

• eight out of 10 (80%) U.S. adults get frustrated waiting for technology
• about half (51% have done something out of character when frustrated while waiting for technology
• of those who admitted acting inappropriately while waiting, 62% of U.S. adults admit to yelling or cursing out loud when their technology can’t keep up with them, while others hit their computer mouse (29%) or bang on their computer screen and keyboard (24%)
• of those who have acted or seen someone act inappropriately in public due to frustrations with technology, 70% saw strangers, 46% have seen family or friends and 33% have seen co-workers act out in frustration while waiting for technology

Not only does uncooperative technology increase stress, frustration, and even violence in users, it causes people to miss out on non-digital activities. Because they were waiting for their computer, more than one third of U.S. adults (35%) said that they missed out on something, such as losing an opportunity to participate in an online sale (13%), or purchase an airline, concert or sporting event ticket.

Intel ties this study into the launch of their 2010 Intel Core processors, which promise to assuage the Hourglass Syndrome with the promise of smarter technology, higher speeds and saved energy. Intel’s psychology expert Cooper Lawrence also recommends taking stress-management measures.

Netflix began as an online video rental service with rotating DVDs that came in the mail, but has become more profitable due to its success as an on-demand movie and TV show streaming service. Several sources were agog as the numbers were released - Netflix is spending large amounts on licensing content from copyright holders, but is still successful at maintaining a large profit. As tech blog WWWery reports, in the second quarter of 2009 “Netflix spent $9 million to get licenses for films and television shows for its online movie and video streaming service” and $66 million Q2 this year. Additionally, “over the last 6 months Netflix had paid $116 for streaming content, as to $31 million spent for the same last year.”

Thought of as responsible for making brick-and-mortar movie rental houses such as Blockbuster obsolete, Netflix could be doing the same for cable television and pay-per-view. According to TMCnet.com, Netflix’s concentration on story-driven material could appeal to a certain category of consumer that does not care about the news, sports and other content that cable networks are heavily laden with.

This sort of material, focusing on newly released films and back episodes of TV shows, is demanding a higher premium from the company. CNET discussed today how Netflix does not even have to raise subscription fees to keep up with these price hikes. Fewer DVDs in postal circulation takes care of some of the cost, as does a higher subscriber base. But a large part is the substantial dropping in bandwidth prices even as Netflix demands more of it to keep up with the increasing numbers of PCs, game consoles and set-top boxes that are receiving the video streams.

Subscribers who watched at over fifteen minutes of streaming content in the second quarter grew 61 percent, up from 37 percent in the 2009 Q2. “From June 2009 to the same month this year, Netflix added nearly 5 million subscribers, a 42 percent increase. By the end of this year, the company says it could possess as many as 18.5 million subscribers.” CNET predicts next year Netflix’s subscriber numbers will equal Comcast’s at twenty million.

This month’s Harvard Business Review reports findings that companies are overcompensating when it comes to customer service. According to research, the article proposes that while customers will go to some length to punish poor service, customers will not be loyal to a brand solely due to fantastic service.

This trend plays out especially in phone-based and self-service interactions - the largest channels of customer service for most larger companies. In these situations, customers care more about how brands deliver on their basic promises than on how the experience is when customers are using these channels. Because many companies fail to recognize this, the report says, they end up wasting a lot of time and money on investing in unnecessary frills rather than on focusing on ease of use, dependability and similar core customer expectations.

The HBR report’s authors discovered findings that they believe should affect every company’s customer service strategy: “First, delighting customers doesn’t build loyalty; reducing their effort—the work they must do to get their problem solved—does. Second, acting deliberately on this insight can help improve customer service, reduce customer service costs, and decrease customer churn.”

In real life, this plays out when customers wait in line at an ATM despite there being available bank tellers inside, in one example given in their blog. Most customers do not want to interact when they can just do it themselves.

Apple and AT&T responded to yesterday’s iPhone 4 pre-order meltdown with their own press releases this morning. As quoted in full by John Paczkowski of Digital Daily, over 600,000 units were reserved yesterday, the largest number of pre-orders Apple has ever taken on a single day, and as their statement explains, "was far higher than we anticipated."

AT&T clarifies the scope of the event, which resulted in an overwhelmed system and frustrated customers, including press members and celebrities, according to the San Francisco Examiner. In AT&T’s statement, the mobile carrier clarifies that sales numbers were ten times higher than the first day of last year’s iPhone 3GS pre-ordering. Due to these system demands, AT&T suspended orders yesterday.

The scope of the technical difficulties extended from brick-and-mortar stores to e-commerce sites. Apple had to halt sales when order and approval systems and supplies ran out, as reported by Asia One Business. Quoted analysts say the new iPhone will outsell the last model, sales of which reached one million units in three days. Another analyst in the same article predicted device sales could reach 10 million per quarter, provided that Apple can meet demand.

The shipping date for the new iPhone model has changed twice today - this morning by Apple from June 24 to July 2 and once more to July 14. Paczkowski ventures a guess to the series of date changes - "Did extraordinary demand drive the company to do so? Or another issue–perhaps the same one that made the white iPhone 4 unavailable for pre-order?"

The explosive response to the new model of the iPhone does beg for explanation. Perhaps the infamous Gizmodo purchase-leak-raid helped to create the phenomenon - it seems impossible that the chain of events could have hindered the release numbers.

Marketers are having difficulty reaching US teen Internet users on social networking sites, despite the fact that eighty percent of teens are signing on to chat with friends or posting status updates.

About ten thousand teen members were surveyed by the social networking/dating/casual gaming site myYearbook and global public relations firm Ketchum in May of this year. The study looked at "influencers" - the top fifteen percent most active and engaged members - and how brands can influence them. Influencer practices include the following:

• 97 percent spend over two hours per day on a social networking site
• 95 percent update their status daily at least
• 91 percent have over 500 friends on these networks
• Only sixteen percent use location apps (Foursquare, Gowalla, etc)

The study shows that teens with more online friends socialize more when offline as well. Teen social media influencers are forty percent more likely to have attended a party the last weekend than average teens, and twenty percent more likely to have had a friend over in the last week.

As noted by Geoff Cook, myYearbook CEO, this disproves the idea that more time spent online makes for a less socially active teen. They also listen to music, play video games, read books, magazines and newspapers at above-average frequencies.

Due to these high levels of media consumption, influencers share and purchase more often. 87 percent share product information with their friends, compared with only half of teens in general. This practice is significant since peer recommendations are the most trusted source regarding possible purchases across age brackets.

Regarding content, the majority preferred brand interaction that is straightforward, but also appreciate when brands are "edgy, fun or shocking - as long as it is done well," and influencers are 41 percent more interested in celebrity news than average teens. Ketchum VP of creative and strategic planning Adrianna Giuliani remarks, “Brands hoping to keep up should find unique ways to participate in the things teenagers already care about versus competing with what’s already capturing their attention.”

Fifty-eight percent of U.S. internet consumers check their email first thing in the morning. That’s a big number, but not totally surprising. What is interesting about this stat is that these people tend to be motivated to interact with brands online for the sake of obtaining deals, promotions, or new product information.

That’s a sizable chunk of the internet population that is interacting with brands online. This something that needs to be quantified further (many brands still treat social media like it’s some sort of incomprehensible magic), and Exact Target’s first Subscribers, Fans and Followers report.

Some more takeaways from the report:

- 38% of U.S. online consumers are FANS.
- 42% of U.S. online consumers use Facebook at least once a day and, of these, 69% are a FAN of one or more companies.
- Another 20% of U.S. online consumers report using Facebook at least once a month, of which 36% are FANS. 32% of consumers have never created a Facebook account.

Not surprisingly, younger users are the biggest social networking brand fans. The 18-24 demographic, the group that is changing everything, has the largest percentage of online consumers who like brands on Facebook (54 percent) or follow them on Twitter (9 percent).

Microsoft will be retiring Bing’s Cashback feature on July 30, 2010, it announced today on the Bing Blog. Cashback offers shoppers rewards that range between two and ten percent of the merchandise price when promoted on behalf of specified partners or advertisers on the Web search engine, as mentioned by ReadWriteWeb this morning.

Yusuf Mehdi cited reasons for abandoning Bing Cashback including a "test-and-learn mentality" and general lack of adoption. Mehdi, author of the post and senior VP of the Online Audience Business Group, assures readers that Bing prizes the experiment principle and that their search engine’s team has learned much from the nearly-outmoded feature.

When Bing cashback was first offered, it was designed to help advertisers reach consumers with incentives, and offer a different type of shopping experience with the possibility of changing user behavior and attracting new Bing users. According to TechCrunch the service was first made available on Microsoft’s previous project Live Search, which enjoyed an increase in revenue but not a larger section of Web search market share.

Back on Bing, over a thousand merchant partners signed on with great ROI for their campaigns, and the customers received a small amount of money taken from the advertising revenue. Since the adoption rate was not what Bing hoped for, they are instead putting what they learned into other programs.

Since shopping is a significant subject for consumer Web search, Bing will try to offer new services related to product decisions, discounts and time-savers. For businesses, Bing will be offering new ideas later in the summer related to getting more products and offers into the Bing shopping search.

For those customers who are interested in using cashback, the service will be available for nearly two additional months, until the end of this July. The service will then end, but users can still redeem offers for an additional year.

Internet users are changing their privacy-protecting habits, as shown by a recent Pew Internet & American Life Project study. Adults in the US are monitoring what is available about themselves on search engines and social networking sites at higher levels, but the individuals who are doing this most often are younger people.

Knowing what comes up from adult Internet users’ name search and maintaining their own online identity has now become a common practice. As the study shows, 57 percent of respondents now use search engines to find information about themselves online, up from 47 percent in 2006. 46 percent of online adults have created their own profile on a social networking site, from twenty percent in 2006.

Not only do respondents monitor their own digital footprints, it is more widespread to do the same with others. 46 percent of Internet users search for online information about people from their past, up from 36 percent in 2006. 38 percent search online about their friends, up from 26 percent.

With the need to manage online identity more standard knowledge than ever, specific activities are also increasing. But young adults, in this case those from eighteen to 29 years old, perform privacy management more often across the board. 44 percent of young adult Internet users take steps to limit the amount of personal information available about them online. Only one third of ages thirty to 49 do the same, one quarter of ages fifty to 64 and one fifth of those aged 65 and older.

With the same age group, 71 percent change the privacy settings on their profile to limit what they share online, but 55 percent of SNS users 50-64 change default settings. Nearly half of young adults (47 percent) delete comments others made on their profile, while 29 percent of 30-49 and 26% of 50-64 have done so. 41 percent have removed their names from photos where they were tagged. Less than one in four aged thirty to 49 and eighteen percent of those 50 to 64 have done the same.

Travel site visitors most often balk at high product prices and fees, but a survey of online travel bookers by PhoCusWright shows that these potential travelers leave for many other reasons. This year’s study, "Consumer Response to Travel Site Performance" showed that this initial response was selected by 43 percent of respondents, but more than half indicated other reasons why they did not make it to checkout.

Second place was taken by three reasons with eleven percent of response: having to register with the travel Web site, insufficient inventory (what the customer wanted to purchase was unavailable), and the site was too slow or took too long. After these issues, nine percent believe that the Web site asked for too much information, and the same amount found the site frustrating or confusing to use. Two more problems at six percent were that the checkout process was too long or confusing, or that the customer was unwilling or unable to give credit card information online. Five percent said that the site crashed or had some technical error.

Different types of individuals react to these setbacks in different ways, as research from Web site performance monitoring firm Gomez showed in December. As eMarketer reports, "nearly one-fifth of US online buyers had experienced slow load times on travel sites," and eleven percent experienced difficulties completing transactions.  Over half of customers would leave after two or less negative experiences on the site, and another quarter would do the same after three tries. Interestingly enough, a masochistic ten percent indicated that "poor experiences will not impact the Websites" used for travel.

Underlining the importance of accessibility and reliability on these travel sites, the same article shows that the Hospitality & Tourism Industry Report from iPerceptions showed these factors in a site are nearly as important as price considerations.

The number of customers adopting online banking is slowing, but users are adopting a more diverse set of services than before, according to comScore’s annual “State of Online Banking” report. That said, there’s still a long way to go until they adopt newer forms of online financial services like Personal Financial Tools.

Since comScore started tracking online banking, the number of U.S users visiting top-10 banking sites has grown from about 40 million in 2006 to more than 58 million in 2010. Sixty million U.S. users visit top-20 banking sites.

Growth is slowing. In the middle of the decade, online banking growth was 5 to 10 percent quarterly, but it has fallen to 1 to 2 percent per quarter.

The online banking market might be plateauing as far as overall users is concerned, but what’s important is that customers are becoming more active. The amount using online bill pay, for example, has grown 19 percent in the last year; almost two-thirds (64 percent) of respondents now use the service.

Automatic and recurring bill pay has also risen significantly in the last year, growing 10 percent to 52 percent of the total who bank online. Customers are also moving towards paperless accounts. The amount doing so grew 5 percent last year to 58 percent.

While customers have become more comfortable to online banking, they remain hesitant or unprepared to move to more sophisticated online financial tools. Only 30 percent of respondents expressed interest in using Personal Financial Tools (PFT), and only 10 percent knew that these types of sites exist.

Four percent of respondents use PFTs.

The recession has obviously changed customers’ relationships with their banks. The amount of importance users give to services like free checking, low minimum balance and the proximity to ATMs all dropped slightly between 2009 and 2010.

What has become more important, significantly more important? Customer service, which rose 18 points in the last year, with 22 percent of respondents rating it as important in 2010, versus only 4 percent who did so in 2009.