In March of 2009 Charter Communications filed for bankruptcy and emerged from Chapter 11 in November of last year minus about $8 billion of Charter’s then $21 billion debt load. Things continue to normalize for the troubled company, Charter announcing they’ve been relisted on NASDAQ under the symbol “CCMM.”

“To resume trading on NASDAQ is an important and meaningful milestone for Charter,” said Mike Lovett, President and Chief Executive Officer in a statement. “Through the hard work and discipline of the entire Charter team, we’ve made significant strides to enhance our products and services, expand our commercial business, and continue to improve customer care.”

I’m personally a Charter customer, here’s to hoping they continue to improve their offerings and service.

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Verizon has made no secret of their interest in expanding beyond broadband and eventually becoming a company that offers you, well, everything including home automation and security services. To that end, Verizon this week has invested in home automation outfit 4Home, and in January at CES, Verizon and 4Home will be showing off home automation services that will work over Verizon’s upcoming LTE wireless broadband network.

Of course maybe before Verizon gets into smart refrigerators they can offer FiOS users that 802.11N-capable router they told us was supposed to arrive last month? We’ve asked for an update on that, but in the mean time you can check out some of what 4Home offers here.

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I’d consider myself somewhat of a gamer. I own a Sony PlayStation 3, I own a Nintendo Wii, I own a PC that I built around my video card (yes, it plays Crysis… quite well thank you) and I’ve purchased games on my Apple iPhone. On the Apple iPhone, I had found myself gravitating towards OpenFeint enabled games, a gaming framework created by the folks over at Aurora Feint that shares your high scores and accomplishments with your friends that also have that game, allows for announcements that range from free games for the day to updates and challenges from friends to beat their scores. All for free.

But what I noticed that a lot of OpenFeint enabled iPhone games had the ability to support in-game purchases on these games that… well, I thought they were losing money and just giving away the game but charging minor prices for trivial, and optional stuff. Boy was I wrong. There’s a lot of money in in-game virtual goods. According to a new Magid report, about $168 million dollars worth of money. That’s huge. And it’ll only get bigger in later years.

Virtual goods purchased on smartphones are a new emerging market in the United States. Who is actually buying them and how much they’re spending, however, has not been completely understood. Today, Frank N. Magid Associates and mobile social gaming network OpenFeint are shedding some light on the subject by providing the first-ever estimate on how much Americans are currently spending on virtual goods.

According to the study, Magid Media Futures 2010 Wireless and Consumers, Americans spent $168 million on mobile virtual goods in the last year. Magid estimates that over 70 million Americans now own smartphones – that’s 23 percent of the population. With 45 percent of those smartphone owners playing mobile games and 16 percent of those spending an average of $41 per year on in-game virtual goods, the market has already exceeded $168 million.

“The market for virtual goods has already exploded in web-based games like Zynga’s Farmville, and we’re just now starting to see this trend in the mobile space,” said Steve Lin, VP Operations of Aurora Feint. “In just the last few months we’ve seen amazing interest from our game developers in building mobile social games with virtual goods. Our internal numbers reflect the study in that free-to-play models will be the dominant pricing structure in the future.”

With 55 percent of smartphone gamers interested in buying virtual goods, the market is poised for strong growth as more virtual goods-based games enter the market. The study also shed more light on who is likely to play games on smartphones. Compared to the general population, smartphone gamers skew male and are between 18 and 34 years of age.

Buying virtual goods isn’t really anything new if you’ve ever played Diablo II or Farmville. But those micro-payments – I’ve personally bought a couple of extra levels for a couple of games to extend my enjoyment of some titles for 99 cents or so – add up. And apparently, it’s a back door to increasing the enjoyment and profitability of a game. And the best part, the people are buying into that mentality and in a big way in the aforementioned age groups (18-34).

“Everybody knows free-to-play social gaming models on PC platforms have been making a killing but mobile virtual goods aren’t as well understood,” said Mike Vorhaus, President, Magid Advisors. “With almost 20 percent of smartphone gamers already making purchases, there’s a lot of room for the market to keep taking off as smartphones continue to increase in popularity.”

Magid has looked pretty deep into the explosion growth of in-game virtual goods purchases of smartphone gaming. I think it’s time I dusted off my programming skills and got serious about making a socially aware, OpenFeint enabled smartphone game that allowed for in-game purchases to get my share of that $168 million and growing market.

[ Links: OpenFeint, Aurora Feint, Magid Advisors ]

Slashdot directs your attention to the fact that wireless carriers are just starting to realize they can monetize all matter of data collected from mobile users – specifically data that highlights their movement habits. According to MIT Technology Review, researchers and marketers are finding plenty of new uses for call detail records, or CDRs which allow them to study a mountain of user behavior data. That data can be used by researchers or city planners to study travel behavior – but it’s likely going to be a gold mine on the marketing behavioral front:

…cell phone networks are thinking about monetizing their data, says Jean Bolot, a researcher at network operator Sprint. This means a “two-sided” business model where they not only serve end users but also make money through relationships with other businesses. “This is new in the telco space but not in other areas–look at Google, for example,” he says. Since almost everyone has a cell phone, the scale of the data is immense compared to other sources. Mobility patterns might, for example, be used to adjust property or billboard advertising prices. “Just about every operator on the planet is probably thinking about this right now,” says Bolot.

Of course all of this raises a number of privacy concerns, and while much of this data is aggregate – it’s not particularly difficult for those who buy this data to identify individual user identities (most of us do stay in one place most nights). Keep in mind many ISPs sell user clickstream data (but deny it) with little or no acknowledgment of this fact to the end user, no oversight and no ability to opt out. It seems likely that privacy, consumer education and consumer controls will be an afterthought here as well.

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Chi Mei Optoelectronics (CMO), among some others, seemed to have gotten a bit greedy for almost 5 years by secretly meeting and agreeing upon setting the price(s) for some TFT LCD displays used commonly in computer monitors.

“Six companies have pleaded guilty to worldwide price fixing of Thin-Film Transistor Liquid Crystal Displays from Sept. 14, 2001, to Dec. 1, 2006. For violating the Sherman Act, the companies have agreed to pay criminal fines of over $860 Million. In addition, nine executives have been charged in the scandal. The pricing scam affected some of the largest companies at the time, including Apple, HP and Dell. (If you bought a TFT-LCD from them in that time frame, you may be one of the victimized consumers.) From the DOJ release, ‘According to the charge, Chi Mei carried out the conspiracy by agreeing during meetings, conversations and communications to charge prices of TFT-LCD panels at certain pre-determined levels and issuing price quotations in accordance with the agreements reached. As a part of the conspiracy, Chi Mei exchanged information on sales of TFT-LCD panels for the purpose of monitoring and enforcing adherence to the agreed-upon prices.’”

Probably explains why CMO earned $30 billion dollars in 2009 alone. Yes, billion… with a “b“.

[ Source: Slashdot.org ]

According to the New York Times, Vivendi executives have agreed with General Electric in principle on a price to offload their 20% stake in NBC Universal, eliminating the final obstacle in Comcast’s planned acquisition of the media giant.

Recent leaks from inside the very leaky “secret” negotiations indicated that Vivendi wanted about $500-$900 million more than GE was willing to pay. The word now is that Vivendi is willing to part with their share for a cool $5.8 billion. As it stands, there’s a few loose ends to clear up, but the final deal should be officially announced by Thursday, according to chatty insiders.

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Despite the best efforts by creditors who didn’t like the bankruptcy conditions, Charter Communications has announced that the company has exited Chapter 11 after filing for bankruptcy back in March of this year. The bankruptcy process and reorganization eliminated about $8 billion of Charter’s $21 billion debt load. According to Charter CEO Neil Smit, the bankruptcy will help the company to “remain focused on further enhancing the customer experience.”

Unfortunately for Charter, a lousy customer experience is one of the major reasons the company went bankrupt in the first place. Charter consistently coming in last place in nearly every survey that measures customer satisfaction among ISPs and TV operators.

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