Tag Archives: smartphones Blog

Internet Trends Report

Knowing how and where people get information tells us how and where to deliver our messages and services. With that in mind, Kleiner Perkins analyst Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends report is a valuable compilation of research and observation. It sheds light on these areas to help us keep up with the ever-changing business/tech landscape. This year’s report, delivered at the recent “All Things Digital” conference, highlights several notable trends.

The move to mobile is in full throttle. Laptop and desktop sales will continue to decline as smartphones and tablets become the devices of choice in the “Post PC” era. Apple and Samsung claimed a combined 51% market share of global smartphone unit sales in Q4 2012, making them the dominant players in the field.

  • Tablets are being adopted even more quickly than smartphones. For the first 12 quarters after launch, iPads have sold 3-times faster than iPhones. Tablet sales also eclipsed sales of desktops and laptops for Q4 2012, and projections are that annual tablet shipments will surpass laptops in 2013 and total PCs in 2015.
  • Mobile Internet traffic is now 15% of total global internet traffic.
  • Time spent with print and radio continues to trend downward while TV and Internet remain steady. Mobile, on the other hand, continues to trend upward. Interestingly, the money that advertisers spend on print is 4-times greater than the time users spend there, while money spent on mobile advertising is one-fourth of the time spent, pointing to a $20B opportunity as advertisers catch up.

The entire presentation is 117 slides and provides information on media, global browsing, and wearable tech.

View full report: [no longer available]

The Mobile Challenge and Opportunity

Everyone is talking about the shift to mobile. We can expect changes in how we do business and get information as smartphones and tablets proliferate. This article points to three strategic problems businesses must solve as workforces become more mobile.

Just as the internet fundamentally changed consumer behaviour and the way we do business in the 1990s, the continued rise of mobile is set to be a major disruptive force over the next decade … That is backed up by a recent Gartner survey of 2,000 chief information officers (CIOs) worldwide, with 70% putting mobile top of the list ahead of other trends such as big data, social media and cloud computing as the technology that will disrupt established business models most for the next 10 years.

Many economic benefits will drive the spread of mobile technology. For our businesses, it’s an excellent time to develop strategies to connect with customers and partners when they’re on the go.

Read full article: http://linkd.in/130cV6a

Apps vs Browsers? No Contest. It’s Apps!

When apps, those little applications that run on smartphones and tablets, first came out a few years ago, a debate arose over which were better, apps or mobile websites, and which would consumers prefer. Developers thought that offering tailored services through a browser was much more desirable, from both cost and usability standpoints, rather than apps, which users would have to update continually, and developers would have to maintain for several platforms. But consumers, hands down, have chosen apps. There’s something about these little one-trick ponies that people have come to love.

In this recent report from Flurry, a mobile analytics and advertising platform, it’s clear that apps command the most time spent on mobile devices by a whopping 4-to-1 ratio. Apps are obviously something consumers want.

Today, the U.S. consumer spends an average of 2 hours and 38 minutes per day on smartphones and tablets. 80% of that time (2 hours and 7 minutes) is spent inside apps and 20% (31 minutes) is spent on the mobile web. Apps (and Facebook) are commanding a meaningful amount of consumers’ time. All mobile browsers combined … control 20% of consumers’ time. Gaming apps remain the largest category of all apps with 32% of time spent. Facebook is second with 18%, and Safari is 3rd with 12%. Worth noting is that a lot of people are consuming web content from inside the Facebook app. For example, when a Facebook user clicks on a friend’s link or article, that content is shown inside its web view without launching a native web browser, which keeps the user in the app. So if we consider the proportion of Facebook app usage that is within their web view,  we can assert that Facebook has become the most adopted browser in terms of consumer time spent.

The article covers several additional points of interest regarding apps, but the takeaway is that it’s time to think about how to use apps to best serve customers. There’s also an opportunity to explore what other economies apps can provide. People are using them, so offering them will become a differentiator in the burgeoning mobile world.

Read full article: [no longer available]

What Comes After Smartphones?

Beyond Smartphones: Google and Microsoft are working on ‘eyeglass computers.’ Is this the next logical step in computer sizing, proximity, and availability? Computers want to get smaller. And more powerful and ubiquitous. It may have something to do with an innate human desire to be telepathic — unbound in time and space. Whatever, it makes sense that someone will find a way to make computing almost as accessible as thought is to our brains. Hence, an ‘eyeglass computer’ featuring voice I/O, an internet connection, video recording, and an embedded display in the glass.

… something like Google Glass or whatever Microsoft is working on could end up replacing the smartphone as the dominant way people access the Internet and connect with others. First off: something has to. Disruption is inevitable. Secondly: The trend is obvious. Computers have been getting smaller and closer to our faces since their very beginning. First, they were in big rooms, then they sat on desktops, then they sat on our laps, and now they’re in our palms. Next, they’ll be on our faces. (Eventually, they’ll be in our brains.)

It’s the “in our brains” concept that’s a little scary. I’m not sure if it’s even possible to develop an interface for that. But in terms of storing everything a government might need to know about us on our person, including our exact location at the moment, that’s not difficult to do today.
But forgetting about what life in that scenario might look like, let’s think about how interesting it would be to get any bit of information we need with just a Siri-like voice query. Unlimited information, just a thought away. If only understanding and wisdom were that available.

Read more: http://read.bi/UVLgwi

Smartphones Reaching Tipping Point

The smartphone revolution marches on! Data from Nielsen (via CNET) shows that more than half of those aged 18 – 24 carry a smartphone today. And numbers for those over 44 are continuing to trend upward. Given these phones’ almost limitless functional capability (via the apps that run on them), we should expect the use of smartphones for more and more of the transactions that people make while on the go. And, since Moore’s Law continues to hold, and users love those little apps that “just work,” the proliferation of powerful, pocket-sized computers, aka smartphones, will only increase.

A lot of technology makes perfect sense on smartphones — technologies that aren’t necessarily as useful on desktops or laptops. These include bar code scanning, NFC (Near Field Communication) for speedy transactions, and photography and video recording. Combine these, and right in your hand, you have a wide range of capabilities in a single device.

Today, people buy smartphones for convenience in connecting and communicating with others, accessing information, carrying media and entertainment, and playing games. But soon, smartphones will be essential for transacting business and making purchases. Once we reach a tipping point, changes, especially around commerce, will snowball.

All of us in business need to consider smartphones. If you want to know where markets are going, look at the devices people use and how they get information. And then start planning for the changes that follow.

Article  and infographic: http://goo.gl/NqVP2

Some Tips for Using QR Codes

Are QR codes useful? Are they here to stay or just a passing tech fad? Here’s an interesting article that explores productive ways that print publications use QR codes and some helpful tips if you’ve been thinking of adopting them.

Walk past a bus shelter, check product packaging, visit a home improvement store and you’ll see Quick Response (QR) codes. They have gone mainstream, as 14 million people scanned a QR code in June, according to a new report from comScore, and it turns out that half of the time they scanned codes in a newspaper or magazine. Newspapers (and some broadcasters) are exploring how they can make good use of these codes to drive traffic from the print product to the Web via mobile devices, and it may be working.

Read full article: How 6 news organizations are using QR codes to drive traffic to news content

NFC On the Move?

We’ve been hearing about NFC (Near Field Communications) for a while now. The technology, expected to empower a new era of mobile commerce, should shortly be upon us. With appropriate chipsets, mobile phones will be able to make payments at the point of sale terminals, similar to how we use credit cards today. Considering the interactivity of web-enabled phones, this is likely to create a host of new opportunities for retail and mobile commerce.

Today, Google is ready to start testing NFC in select retail locations in NY and SFO. The following article provides insights into how we might use the technology. NFC is one to watch.

Read full article: Report: Google to Test NFC Mobile Payment Service in NY, San Francisco:http://bit.ly/gHARoF

Laptop Killer?

How many computers do you use most days? A desktop at work and a laptop for the road? Another desktop at home? How about a netbook for the couch? And then there’s your smartphone — those computers in our pockets that allow us to use the Web, do email, work with documents, take photos, and videos, manage appointments and contacts etc., etc., etc. And, oh yes, make phone calls. Right! And with apps, these smartphones can do hundreds of other helpful computing tasks. They’re full-blown computers, and we’ve only begun to tap their potential.

Well, what if you could carry a smartphone around with you that contained all your applications, data, documents, photos, videos, contacts etc., etc., that you could plug into a terminal, say in the office, a coffee shop, the airport, etc., that provided a keyboard, screen, pointing device, and ports for external devices. After hooking up, the terminal would become a regular computer system with your exact computing environment ready to go. When finished, you unplug and carry your digital world with you to use in miniature on the device or in full mode on the next terminal. Think of how little redundancy and much convenience are afforded when you don’t have to sync everything and can work seamlessly wherever you go.

I’m not sure how close we are to that day, but we can see it coming. A new smartphone and docking station fulfills a good part of this dream: Motorola’s Atrix 4G, an Android smartphone that debuted at CES this week. It can turn your smartphone into a laptop, much as described above, through its accessory docking station. Could this configuration become a “laptop killer?” Future phones will need faster processors, more storage, and more powerful apps before they can replace our notebooks. But the past is prologue in computer hardware, so there is some assurance that it’s just a matter of time before our phones will compete with, if not replace, the computers we use every day.

Read full article: http://nyti.ms/eYfUtM

Q: Are Web Apps the Future of Websites? (A: Yes)

As we become a more mobile society, in the sense of the devices we use, everything becomes smaller. “Smaller” includes the time expected to complete tasks (or to be unavailable), the keyboards and screens we use, and the applications necessary to do our work. The Age of Apps is here. Due to the success of the iPhone, we can expect to see AppStores everywhere: the “MacApp Store,” “the ChromeApp Store,” “the AdroidApp Store,” and app stores from probably every telecom, computer platform, and device maker known to humankind.

Why have Apps become all the rage? People want to do things on the go, and Apps provide functionality in portable form with wonderful simplicity. Most apps do a single function very well. They’re easy to install and use and, in general, exemplify what people have always wanted from computers. With this in mind, businesses should start thinking of how they can offer their content and functionality as simple apps that people can use on the go.

In the mid-2000s, many of us still had to “go online” – meaning if we wanted to use Internet services like e-mail or read the content published in a blog, we needed to get to a computer connected to a network.

That doesn’t happen anymore. Or, at least, it’s happening less and less. We now travel about our real-world surrounded by a bubble of data and functionality that is always available to us. And, since we have ditched the spending-time model in favor of the doing-tasks model, we should expect that the organization of functionality and content should change as well.

No one had to persuade people to start using apps (unlike the unrelenting “education” of consumers regarding 3D TV). The demand has always been there. Now there’s a way to deliver the goods via portable devices. People like having their data and functionality with them. Smart businesses will take note and begin finding ways to provide customers with the information and capabilities they want when on the go.

Read full article …