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Letter from the President of HomePNA
In the past several months, members of the HomePNA marketing work group have gotten a lot of traction through our marketing products eNews Monthly, NewsFlashes and our Blog (http://homepnablog.typepad.com/). We've also developed systems to better collect e-mail addresses to build up our contact database and create more communication tools to keep our membership updated and continually informed and recruit new members. Based on statistical results, we can proudly say that our readership is growing on a monthly basis.
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The HomePNA blog is another marketing tool paying off. The blog launched just five months ago and continues to grow on a weekly basis. High interest subject matter such as announcements and analysis regarding the emerging all-wires home networking standard G.hn, technical subjects such as QoS, and relevant market news have helped make our blog the rapidly growing source on trends in home networking. Any given day we post a new item we watch our readership numbers spike. A slow day might have 20 views while a day with a hot announcement can jump over 60 views. Industry feedback is that analysts and editors are using it as one of their "go-to" places for home networking.
The most recent blog post http://homepnablog.typepad.com/ talks about the rapid growth of AT&T U-verse TV with 170,000 new customers in the second quarter of 2008 (compared to 176,000 new Verizon FIOS TV customers). With the rapidly growing number of large telcos deploying HomePNA 3.1, we believe that last quarter saw more HomePNA 3.1 home networks installed over coax than any other type of coax-based home networking technology.
We are up to 2,386 lifetime page views. Consider that we started at zero not very long ago - and new readers continue to log on almost daily.
Website visibility and activity has also been great for 2008. As an indication, www.HomePNA.org had around 200,000 hits a month (an average of 6,600 hits per day) in the first quarter of 2008. The number of hits increased to over 340,000 by the end of the July (over 11,300 per day) - an increase of 70 percent. There were over 3100 visitors to the website in July.
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Now
that we have these highly effective tools in place, our
commitment is to keep the
momentum building and close the loop by signing new members. In the
last two quarters of 2008, we will focus our energy on using the
information we cull from these tools to directly reach interested
parties. Our intention to become more aggressive with recruitment
will help keep not just HomePNA but our entire ecosystem of members
healthy and thriving even in an increasingly challenging economic
environment.
The
Marketing group is also in the final stages of creating a HomePNA
community with enhanced relationship tools such as Wiki and forum
software that will be available behind the HomePNA website firewall.
These tools will compliment the installation support information
being added to the website and help members and especially service
providers exchange experiences and get answers to technical questions
to support the rapidly growing HomePNA deployments.
We
are adding new content to the website. Look for whitepapers
such as "Beyond Digital Home Networking" and an
assortment of technical papers to be added to the Resources section
of the public website
http://www.homepna.org/en/resources/whitepapers1.asp
shortly. We have added an archive for Newsletters and News
Flashes to the HomePNA Press Room
http://www.homepna.org/en/press/index.asp
and encourage you to send us your press releases so we can post them
on the Member Press Releases page.
We
urge all members to forward this newsletter and others to interested
parties and help with our recruitment drive.
Information on member benefits and membership form downloads are on
the HomePNA website http://www.homepna.org/en/join/index.asp.
And we want to thank you in advance for all of your
support and help with our marketing endeavors and to ask you to send
Michelle Gamble-Risley, marketing manager, tips on stories for the
blog. It's your marketing tool and we
would love to post blogs and write newsletter articles about your
products and successes. Michelle can be reached at
mrisley@inventures.com.
Rich
Nesin
President,
HomePNA
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The Value and Benefit of
HomePNA Certification
If you're monitoring the home networking market then you may have noticed the usage of the HomePNA name on quite a few products. Did you know that not all of those companies that use the HomePNA trademarked name are members of HomePNA (www.homepna.org)? In fact, unless a company is a member and has certified their product through our certification program you have no guarantee that that product will function or conform as specified in the HomePNA specification or provide interoperability with other HomePNA certified products. In order for a product to become certified, a company must sign up, become a member, and go through the certification process (http://www.homepna.org/en/certification/certification_policies.asp). The certification process has two-stages: interoperability testing and certification. First, member companies perform extensive testing to verify functionality and conformance to the HomePNA certification specification. Second, regularly scheduled "Plugfest" events allow HomePNA members to test the operation of their products with other member's products. During the Plugfest events, HomePNA performs certification testing to ensure that they comply with critical parameters of the certification specification. Once products pass the certification process, they receive HomePNA's official "seal of approval" and can use the HomePNA logo. We urge all companies out there using our trademarked name on your products to take advantage of all of the exciting opportunities HomePNA membership affords. Member companies enjoy an array of benefits including:
- Increased visibility and awareness of your company and products through a high-value marketing programs, inclusion in monthly press releases, features in newsletters, bylined articles authored by HomePNA about your company and placed in the press, success stories featuring your company, and participating in driving the momentum of the home networking market place.
- Access technology that offers your customers additional services while meeting your needs for a low-cost, highly reliable, high-speed home networking solution.
- Ability to help design and drive the vision of no-new-wires home networking.
- Information to stay abreast of internationally recognized, open and interoperable standards and best practices that facilitate interoperability and convergence of all networked IP data in the home.
- Access to gain a broad understanding of HomePNA technology and its opportunities for your products, services and industry.
- Opportunity to network and collaborate with some of the industry's leading technology companies.
- Access to become a part of a larger ecosystem that drives open development, leveraging economies of scale, and contributing to a broader, interoperable marketplace.
If you're one of those companies using the HomePNA, take advantage of the real opportunities HomePNA affords by signing up to become a member today: http://www.homepna.org/en/join/index.asp.
If you just want to find out more about membership, please send Michelle Gamble-Risley an e-mail at mrisley@inventures.com.
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"This type of technology enables TELUS to cost-effectively distribute
new IP services throughout customers' homes with the reliability they
expect but without the high installation costs of running new wires."
- Ira Rowlands, Planning and Engineering Manager, Telus
"The ability to work over both coax cable and traditional phone lines
is a key advantage and we look forward to working with the industry to
enhance and standardize the technology."
-David Deas, Vice President, Networks and Services,
AT&T Laboratories, Inc.
"Eighty percent, 90 percent of installations are homes that have coax.
We absolutely have to have the (HPNA) technology; it's been a godsend
for us (because) anywhere we're launching our IPTV service there's a
good take rate ... ahead of our forecasts. They're taking multiple TVs,
multiple devices all bundled together and packaged together," Lund
said. "We wouldn't put HPNA in if it wasn't going to handle high def
PVR applications."
- Gary Lund, CTO, Bell Alliant
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