Mobile Strategy » Research

67% Of The World’s Population Are Mobile Subscribers – What are you doing about it?

Jose HC — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:08:09 +0000

A new report published yesterday by the UN indicates that 67% of the world’s population, or two-thirds total, are mobile subscribers- far outweighing Online access.

67% of the world’s population represents around 4.6B people, up from only 1B in 2002, indicating staggering continued growth. In developing nations, however, the uptake is even more substantial with 57% of the total population in these nations being mobile subscribers, even though other technologies are scarce.

via mobilemarketingwatch.com

What’s your Mobile Strategy?

Regardless of what you do… you need to think through this. How does it affect your business? Your constituents? Your congregants? Your members?

You don’t have to be a business to have a strategy… you just need to understand that you have them right there. They all have mobile devices … what are you going to do about it?

What’s your call to action?

Posted via web from Mobile Strategy

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Mobile Trends 2020

Jose HC — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 17:18:37 +0000

Most of you have probably seen the presentation and the blog post at Rudy’s site but for those of you who haven’t I thought a good way of kicking off our first post of the year is to view this collection of predictions from the experts for the decade ahead. I offer no commentary … just the slides.

Mobile Trends 2020

View more documents from rudydw.

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The Mobile Industry In 2009

Jose HC — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 15:07:22 +0000

Over at Tomi Ahonen’s Communities Dominate Brands Blog is a great summary post of the size of the Mobile Industry in 2009. Below is an excerpt:

The mobile telecoms industry became one of only a handful industries on the planet to generate one Trillion dollars last year and out of that, roughly speaking 800 B is in service revenues (voice and data) and the remaining 200 B in hardware (phone handsets and network infrastructure). Voice accounts for approx 75% of all service revenues or 600 B dollars. Mobile messaging is worth about 130 B and non-messaging data services about 70 B dollars. Of the hardware, a little over 150 B is handsets and a little under 50 B is network infrastructure income to the industry. For contrast, mobile is twice the size of the global TV industry or the total worldwide advertising industry or the total PCIT/nternet industry; as well as twice the size of its former big brother but now little brother, the fixed landline telecoms industry.

You can read the rest of the post here and buy the 2009 Almanac here.

Professional Services in Mobility: Who Would You Trust?

Jose HC — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 06:26:18 +0000

Several people over the last week have informed me that one of the Canadian carriers is close to launching a new professional services group in Canada. The details around that are sketchy but this raises the question as to who should really provide professional services in the mobile space.

A couple of rhetorical questions to get our collective brains going on this topic…

What influences your decision when shopping for these services?

Trust – as in existing relationships
Experience – as in a delivery track record
Cost – as in cheaper
Or is it something else?

Who would you trust more?

Carriers
Device Manufacturers
System Integrators
Value Added Resellers
Application Developers

Who would you really trust? … and what is that trust based on?

And what about experience? In what? On their own platform, their own devices or their own applications?

So let’s think about…

Who is best positioned to succeed in the delivery of professional services in the mobile space?
Who should not even consider delivering professional services in the mobile space?
Who would you definitely not trust?
What should be offered … and by whom?

I really want to hear from you on this one. Typically I don’t ask for much opinion or feedback (silence scares me) … but I definitely want to hear from you this time.Similar Posts:

13 Things To Remember When Integrating Mobility (Or How To Avoid Process Peddlers)

Jose HC — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 08:31:20 +0000

Regardless of whether it is the first time your mobile workers receive a device, or if you are deploying a new application, your people and your processes will never be the same. Mobility changes the way we work; it is transformational and because of this you need to pay very close attention to your processes. If you are not looking (and I mean really looking) at how to best integrate your new technology or application into your existing workflows you will be faced with anything from poor adoption to outright failure.

So what do I mean by process peddlers?

Process peddlers may be vendors, mobile application developers or even the junior resource in that other department on the fourth floor. These process peddlers talk about the importance of process mapping but at the end of the implementation, all they have done is connected a few boxes with some arrows (current and future state workflows) without adding value to the ultimate success of your project. Sadly enough, I have seen them far too many times. In fact I have even worked with them or had to come in and fix their mistakes to try and revive a failing implementation.

In case you don’t get through the long post here are the two main takeaways:

Process peddlers are a waste of resources.
Real process integration experts are invaluable to the success of a mobile implementation.

To help you avoid process peddlers, below is a list of key concepts you should look for when you are being pitched to. I also understand that you yourself may be one of those people that talks about process without any idea of what or how to analyze one. This list is also for your benefit. At the very least look for the following:

Experience – Real experience with relevant examples of situations where new technologies or new methods were succesfully integrated into existing workflows.
Measurement – As they relate their experiences they will mention results. And these results will be explained to you through measurable improvements. You can’t talk about real improvements without knowing the numbers – the indicators (whatever these are for their given examples).
Upstream and Downstream – Your process expert will talk and ask questions about what happens upstream and downstream of the specific area being worked on. Your process expert will want to understand how current changes impact and are impacted by what happens before and after.
Inputs – This refers to process inputs. What feeds into the process? Actual product? Labor hours? Information/knowledge? Parts? Purchase Orders? It is different from a process trigger and it refers to all inputs into the process.
Outputs – What are the process outcomes, outputs and deliverables? Your process expert will make sure that these are not negatively impacted with the new process. Quality and service levels should not suffer but either stay the same or improve.
Cycle Times – Is the total time from the beginning to the end of the process. Your process expert will want to understand the cycle time for your given process and will be able to explain to you if it will be shortened by the implementation or not.
Capacity – Your process expert will be able to tell you how they measure the capacity of a process and why that is important… and what it could mean to you.
Workload – How much work will each individual employee have after the changes. Will it be more or less? If less then you will want to fill it with more value added work. If more, will it be too much? Your process expert will measure the workload and how it is affected by the new technology.
Compliance – You do not want to overburden you mobile workers by measuring, controlling and following up on every single action. But compliance is probably important to you. Your process expert will be good at being able to find a few key points in the process and advising on how best to measure these to ensure compliance or simply to follow up on your mobile workers.
Documentation – The new processes should be documented in detail in the form of procedures/manuals. It is a given … but just make sure you do ask for this.
Expectations – When you optimize a process the expectations need to change, otherwise you will not reap the benefits of the improved process. If you previously expected your field technicians to do an average of 5 calls per day… the new technology should change that. What is it? 6 per day? 8 per day? Your process expert will help you with this.
Change Management – No this is not about IT change requests. This is about your people and how to help them change from doing things the old way to the new way. Change management is about people and what they need to get on board.
Support – When you implement mobile technology or a mobile application there are going to be impacts on your support organization. Somebody needs to look after it, right? You would be surprised how often this gets overlooked. Everything from use cases, to scripts, to escalation trees and all documentation needs to be in place. Make sure you understand these impacts early on. Your process expert will be able to do this… easily!

There are some things missing here. But if you are able to get a process expert to answer and prove their worth on the points you are well on your way to integrating your new mobile technology or mobile application into your existing workflow.Similar Posts:

Mobile Strategy for Small Business: It’s About Local Convenience

Jose HC — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 16:02:11 +0000

Small businesses are an under served market in mobility. We constantly hear about the importance of small businesses to our economies, yet today few would argue that this sector is properly served and serviced from a mobility standpoint. Of course, carriers have plans but many times they simply rebrand a family plan as a small business plan and push it out. The effort to sell to the smallest of small businesses is often not worth the return to some of the larger players. This is all improving and will continue to do so as the cloud and open source makes business models that cater to the smallest firms much more attractive and manageable. As a small business owner you may already be seeing some improvement and your mobile strategy is starting to take shape.

Or maybe as a small business owner you still feel ignored and you don’t know what to do with this mobility thing. My humble guess would be that the vast majority of small business owners are not thinking or even remotely contemplating a mobile strategy. There are many different angles to take on the topic of small business and mobility, but for today and for now let’s just focus on one part of it: as a small business would you benefit from a mobile application?

Small Business and Mobile Applications

The simple answer, and I am sure many would agree with this, is no. The time and effort required to design, build, distribute, market and maintain a mobile application is not what you are in business for. A few may try to sell the idea of a mobile application to you but you will be hard pressed to make a case for it.

Without a mobile app you are seemingly left without mobile options. The thought of not being present when the need arises in your customers (when mobile) may worry you. In fact it may even terrify you. This is where search in general and local search in particular become your best option.

A Case for Local Search

Human geographers will tell you that everything happens in space; a particular point in space. All human interactions happen somewhere. For you as a small business owner your work, your clients and customers are mostly local. This is why local search is your friend, why competition in this space will heat up and why existing players with key advantages stand to benefit the most.

It is about convenience … local convenience!
It is the middle of January and you and your family are returning from Costa Rica where you just had a wonderful eco-tourism vacation. You are happy to hear that you just missed some of the coldest weather in years… unfortunately you walk into a freezing cold house due to a broken down furnace.

What do you do?

Blame the kids?
Boot up your computer in the basement?
Go back to Costa Rica?
Take out your smartphone?

If you answered ‘take out your smartphone‘ you answered the way I did. The other option of digging through night tables and recycling boxes to find a telephone directory doesn’t even enter my mind for this scenario. Your phone is right there with you.

Now what would you do?

Browse to your favourite search engine?
Then search for ‘emergency furnace services Toronto‘
Click on the first few options?
Click on an ad?

Or would you instead…

Open up a local search application
Search for ‘emergency furnace services Toronto?‘
Click on ‘closest to your home‘ option
Look at the first few (perhaps check a video)
Pick one and call them immediately!

We spend our money and buy a majority of our services locally. Our context is local! We may research products on the web from around the world… but when it comes to actually purchasing them we do a lot of that locally.

As a small business owner seeking presence in the minds and wallets of mobile consumers you want to be there when the moment of need arises. Lots to think about. We will try and come back to this topic over the next few weeks.

Here are some other things to consider…
How social can a local search app be?
What about product availability and inventory?
Menu and prices?
So what other things could be leveraged on top of a local search application?
In your opinion is local search the best option for small business?Similar Posts:

Mobile Applications and Loyalty

Jose HC — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:25:27 +0000

Add this one to the interesting and confusing column. But you should still pay close attention.

Take a look at the following:

73 percent of Blackberry owners have downloaded 5 or fewer applications; in contrast, 72 percent of iPhone owners have downloaded 10 or more applications. [Source]
Smartphone Owners Only Use Half of Installed Applications Regularly (Only 57% of all Smartphone applications on a device are being used regularly).
Apple users download and install the most applications, [but] they do not necessarily use the installed applications any more than other Smartphone users do on a regular basis. Android users report that they have removed one-third of the apps that they had installed on their Smartphones, while BlackBerry users keep almost all of the applications they download. [Source for this and previous point]

With respect to iPhone users the previous point is further reinforced by the stats over at the Flurry Blog a few weeks ago:

Loyalty by Application Category

Only an average of 25% of iPhone applications are used after three months. If you allow me to mix some numbers we can make a jump and perhaps even conclude that BlackBerry users are more loyal and less fickle than iPhone users. But before we do that, let’s take some further liberties with the numbers.

Some Crazy And Loose Analysis

If we take the following statements from above…
1. ’57% of all Smartphone applications on a device are being used regularly’
2. ’73 percent of Blackberry owners have downloaded 5 or fewer applications‘
3. and on top of these we add the fact that ‘BlackBerry users keep almost all of the applications they download’
Then we could loosely conclude (I sound like an analyst don’t I) that …
We could then also take the following statements from above…
1. ’72 percent of iPhone owners have downloaded 10 or more applications’
2. Apple users download and install the most applications, [but] they do not necessarily use the installed applications any more than other Smartphone users do on a regular basis.‘
3. ’57% of all Smartphone applications on a device are being used regularly’
4. But to this one we can add the extra ingredients provided by Flurry that on average only 25% of applications are in use after three months.

Again we could once more loosely conclude (I am now blushing) that …

Careful With The Numbers

It is actually difficult to know who to believe. Everyone has different numbers and a different story. At times you get the distinct impression that everyone is trying to sell you something (oops, hold on – everyone is!). The numbers above from Strategy Analytics and Flurry seem to me to be more credible than some of the other figures I have seen over the last few months. Did I mention loosely already? Maybe I am being too harsh. Perhaps the problem is that anyone can do anything with numbers (as I have in the above exercise).

Take a look for example at the App Store Market data (also published in this blog) from AppsFire that claims…

an average of 65 apps installed per device

There is certainly a big delta between 2.5 and 65. Back when I wrote it I cautioned against taking those numbers at face value since the sample was both small and probably slanted to power users.

At the end of the day we are all responsible for what we buy into or not; and how we use that information. However, the main conclusion we can draw out of this is one that you probably already know if you have been deploying applications for some time:

Don’t ignore the end user! Or your application will be dropped like a hot potato!

It is still surprising to me how many times I have seen applications deployed or new systems installed without the end user being consulted (or at least studied) and without any awareness of the day-to-day processes. The same applies to mobile consumer applications and that’s where the lifeflow versus workflow idea came from.

In the meantime… what do you think:

About the numbers and the data being thrown out there?
Do you believe it? Does it match your reality and what you have seen?
What does it tell us about the differences between BlackBerry and iPhone users?

Enterprise Mobility Implications - We will touch on these over the next few days. Loyalty in the consumer space is great but when we talk about adoption and ownership in mobile enterprise users we are diving into the deep and murky waters of workflows, design, usability and even mobile application analytics. Stay tuned. Similar Posts:

Venture Capital Investment Climbs in Q3 2009 (in Mobile Too)

Jose HC — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 05:07:08 +0000

If you found our popular and not so old post on Silicon Valley investments into the mobile industry interesting you will probably find the information released at ChubbyBrain yesterday both interesting and encouraging…

And now it’s official: with ChubbyBrain’s latest numbers tallied, we can announce that money flowing from venture capital investors to entrepreneurs increased by a respectable 14% in Q3 2009 over the prior quarter.

Not 100% there … but at least looking better:

… when we look at the year over year numbers, $6.1B still is not nearly where Q3 2008 was with its $7.2B of funding based on our data. The magnitude of and time for the VC asset class to recover is uncertain at best despite the pundits’ predictions. However, the sequential quarter over quarter growth story being observed in the data gives us hope that things are improving.

They have a series of about 18 posts over at the Chubby Brain blog where you can get all the detail. I wanted to mostly highlight some of the mobile related data.

The Mobile & Telecom sector was third (behind healthcare and internet) with $803 Million divided across 52 deals. Here is a breakdown of those deals:

- Software & Services 52% (but only 14% of funding)
- Towers & Infrastructure 45%
- Telecom Devices & Equipment 26%

The average deal size was up to $15M with these more capital intensive industry categories (the latter two) driving up the aggregate sector’s average deal size.

Some graphs for you below. Go to the Chubby Brain Blog to read the rest of it …

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Mobile Analytics Update

Jose HC — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:51:01 +0000

Just added four more providers to the Mobile Analytics page. There is obviously further parsing and analysis that needs to be done… but for now it is just a list and it is your job to go find them. The response so far has been great – if you have any further information please let me know.

List of Mobile Analytics Providers

Jose HC — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 18:35:39 +0000

Late last night we created a new page – Mobile Analytics.

Current Navigational Header

Today this link takes you to a comprehensive list of mobile analytics providers. Of course this is only the beginning. This is not a complete list and we fully expect to update it over the coming days and weeks. The intent is to eventually have an entire area with mobile analytics resources. If you are a provider or know of one please contact me since we plan on running a profile on each provider as well as creating grid highlighting the features and differences.

Oh yes … one more thing – don’t forget to subscribe to our feed.Similar Posts: