Archive for the ‘Smartphones’ Category
Tablets will fuel the next stage of the mcommerce revolution
March 7th, 2013
I picked up a great infographic on mcommerce this week from Intela, a global provider of database marketing solutions (not a client) that showed, to me at least that tablets will fuel the next stage of the mcommerce revolution.
You can click on the infographic clip to see the full version. Very impressive!
It seems pretty clear from the graphic information Intela have shared that people in their millions are happy to use mobile devices to shop, despite the usability issues, which I think are pretty insurmountable in the case of smartphones.
Smartphones are not the easiest of shopping assistants. It’s about size – from the screen to the keypad to the connection.
But all these issues fade to grey when shoppers use tablets. Functionally brilliant, designed for the future, desirable and culturally relevant, tablets do mcommerce to near-perfection.
An admission here. I do not currently own a tablet (iPad, obviously) but I know people who do own them. And they tire of me using their tablets so often, but needs must.
I hope soon to join the people who Forrester say will own a tablet. The research company released data this week that predicts tablet ownership in Western Europe is set to quadruple in the next five years.
Significantly, Forrester positions these people as online consumers and says 55 per cent of them will have a tablet within four years. Currently, the figure is 14 per cent.
The forecast is based on a survey of more than 13,000 respondents from France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the UK.
The dramatic growth forecast is partly predicated on the fact that tablet ownership doubled in 2012, and one in seven online Europeans now owns a tablet, and these devices are most popular with 18- to 24-year-olds, with one in four owning one.
“Tablets are social devices mostly used in the digital home,” states Thomas Husson, Forrester analyst and co-author of the new data report. “Companies that want to exploit tablet opportunities need to understand they require a differentiated approach from smartphones.” Thomas blogs about the report here.
Co-author Reineke Reitsma, a research director at Forrester, writes in her blog post: “Our data shows that tablets have found their sweet spot: Bigger than a smartphone and more portable than a laptop, they have bridged the gap between these two devices, allowing consumers to entertain and inform themselves.”
Other findings from the report include:
The living room (where 62% access the Internet on their tablet) and the bedroom (where 45% access the Internet on their tablet) are the only places where tablet owners choose their tablet over their smartphone.
Tablet owners are not precious about their devices: Of those that have a spouse/partner, 63% share their tablet with them; one-third of parents share their tablet with their children. This makes tablets a far more social device than smartphones, which are much more personal and intimate.
“The European Tablet Landscape,” is available to Forrester Technographics® clients here (registration required).
This research is reinforced by IAB data, recently released that shows tablet users want to connect digitally with brands
49% are interested in connecting with brands via social networks (index vs European internet users: +30%)
•43% via QR codes you scan using a mobile (index: +25%)
•50% via location based vouchers (index: +24%)
•50% via playing games as part of advertising campaigns (index: +99%)
•44% via playing games on a brands website (index: +85%)
Tablet users made an average of 22.8 purchases in 6 months (15.1 for European internet users)
•7.7 in one month (5.2 for European internet users)
•Tablet users spent an average of 718 euros in 6 months (544 for European internet users)
•175 euros in one month (148 for European internet users)
European tablet users spend
9.3 hours a week accessing the internet via tablets
The full IAB report is worth a read
I’m saving up for my iPad. I know I will be joining the mcommerce revolution quite shortly. All being well.
Mobile World Congress starts today – awesome infographic to celebrate 31 years of cell phones
February 25th, 2013
Mobile World Congress kicks off this morning (Feb 25th) in Barcelona and you can watch the live mobile stream here. There have been a few grumbles about the relevance of MWC recently but it remains the single most important global mobile event.
To celebrate, and wish all the delegates a great show, here’s is an awesome infographic created by geek, freelance writer and graphic designer DJ Miller, a graduate student at the University of Tampa. Respect, DJ.
Click on the link image to see the full infographic. Thanks to The Next Web for sharing.
Featured image credit: Thinkstock
A deeper look at the demographics of Social Media Users
February 19th, 2013
The Pew research Center has recently releases its U.S.- focused social networking report
which highlighted some interesting trends on who’s using social media most and which social networks are most popular.
You can download the full report here:
In summary: “The Demographics of Social Media Users 2012” study found that the most frequent social media users are women aged 18 to 29. Women have been significantly more likely to use social networking sites than men since 2009. In December 2012, 71 percent of women were users of social networking sites, compared with 62 percent of men.
Overall, 67 percent use Facebook, and 16 percent use Twitter, which is especially appealing to adults in the 18 to 29-year-old category. Key demographics are charted in the images at the bottom of this post.
Pinterest has practically caught up with Twitter, with 15 percent of adult U.S. Internet users.
Pinterest, which launched in 2009, has experienced explosive growth. Women are five times more likely to use Pinterest (5 percent vs. 25 percent) and almost twice as likely to be white and college-educated.
13 percent of U.S. online adults say they use Instagram, 6 percent say they use Tumblr, and 20 percent of U.S. online adults say they use LinkedIn as of August 2012.
40 percent of mobile phone owners use a social networking site on their phone, and 28 percent do so on a typical day.
The report also looked at Creators and curators, defining them as follows:
As of August 2012:
• 46 percent of U.S. adult internet users post original photos or videos online that they themselves have created. We call them creators.
• 41 percent of U.S. adult internet users take photos or videos that they have found online and re-post them on sites designed for sharing images with many people. We call them curators.
Overall, 56 percent of internet users do at least one of the creating or curating activities studied and 32 percent of internet users do both creating and curating activities.
Interestingly, not using social media may be an elite thing. Those with a college degree are slightly less likely than those with some college education to use social networks (69 percent vs. 65 percent).
UK shoppers spend the most online
December 14th, 2012
The UK is leading the way when it comes to shopping online, according to Ofcom’s International Communications Market Report.
The report looks at the take-up, availability, price and use of broadband, landlines, mobiles, TV and radio across 17 major countries: UK, France, Germany, Italy, the US, Canada, Japan, Australia, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland, Poland, Brazil, Russia, India and China.
Ofcom’s figures confirm that consumers in the UK spend an average of £1,083 a year when shopping online, compared with Australia which spends the second highest at £842.
Mobile devices play a large part in the success of online retail in the UK, and we download more data from our mobiles than any other nation. In fact, 16% of all web traffic in the UK is from mobile devices, which is more than any other European country.
Outside of Europe, British mobile use still leads the way, for example; in December 2011 the average UK mobile connection used 424MB (megabytes) of data, higher than Japanese users who averaged 392MBs.
Considering the UK population’s love of mobile access, it’s not surprising that we have one of the highest penetrations of smartphones, with almost 60% of British mobile phone owners saying they have one, second only to Germany, and up from 46% in the last report.
Only 37 per cent use a desktop computer as their most frequent means of accessing the internet.
Social networks have played a key role in demand for mobile devices, with 40% of UK adults accessing their profiles via the medium.
British 18-to 24-year-olds are also proving to be the world’s top mobile social networkers, with 62% accessing their profiles from smartphones and tablets, a higher proportion than any of the countries analysed in the report.
Mobile connectivity speeds – myths and personal reality
November 30th, 2012
The Guardian newspaper published an article on mobile connectivity speeds in the UK recently. Weird thing is, my personal connectivity speed bears no relation to its findings.
I check my mobile connection speeds regularly, turning off WiFi connection first to get the clearest data.
At 15:45 this afternoon, according to Speedtest.net, the Ping time was 756 milliseconds, with the down-stream coming in at 0.02 mbps, matched by the upstream connection speed.
I have no reason to doubt the Guardian’s data but it is a puzzle that I can only achieve these paltry speeds on what is supposed to be a fast mobile network. The provider is O2 so either I’m not connecting to a 3G network or the network is not functioning to maximum effect.
The Guardian reports that the average speed of a mobile phone connection in the UK has risen to 2.6 megabits per second with customers of Three and Vodafone receiving the fastest 3G services.
To mark the arrival of fourth generation wireless broadband (4G) last month, the title asked readers to put their networks to the test.
“Results poured in from Inverness to Plymouth, from the Welsh valleys to Hull and London, and the verdict is that, while coverage remains patchy, speeds have improved since the last major survey two years ago found a national average of 1.5 Mbps.â€
Currently the Guardian mobile speed tester is unavailable, which is a pity but, anyway, Â I trust Speedtest.net to deliver accurate results.
With more than 7,300 separate measurements recorded via the Guardian’s mobile phone speed tester, largely on 3G with a sprinkling from EE’s new 4G network, a picture emerged of a mobile internet that for the first time truly qualifies as broadband, and that is at its best faster than Wi-Fi connections at home. You can see the results of the research here.
Significantly, the Guardian report advises that too often the service that users pay for is patchy and inconsistent, particularly in rural areas and in cities during rush hour, with one commuter describing their iPhone 5 as “an expensive paper weight” and another saying coverage on motorways in the south-east of England was “unpredictable or useless”.
I have never, not once, achieved the connection speeds on my mobile that are being touted as a mean average in the UK by the Guardian. I’m no slouch when it comes to mobile technologies so do not believe that there is a set-up dysfunction on my iPhone 4s.
I travel to London from Brighton quite a lot and the mobile connectivity service on that train run is, frankly, laughable.
There is absolutely no way that I can currently use my iPhone effectively as a business device with the kinds of speeds I’m getting.
I just think that we have a very long way to go before we have ‘everywhere fast connectivity’ on our mobile devices and this is surely due to the lacuna between what the mobile network operators promise and what they deliver each day around the UK.
We deserve better from the mobile operators, who charge a princely sum for the privilege of tapping into their creaking, overloaded, slow and unstable networks.
Fast mobile connectivity is, finally, shaping up nicely in the UK
November 16th, 2012
Astonishing news today about fast mobile connectivity – 3 UK, says it will deliver dual-carrier HSPA to half of the UK population by year-end and 80 per cent by next April.
What part of brilliant is this not?! If 3 can do this, then we can be sure that we will, finally, after watching paint dry for ten years, have the network speed we need to do business and pleasure.
According to Mobile Business Briefing 3 has advised that its Ultrafast network is already live in 50 of the UK’s biggest cities and towns, covering 39 per cent of the population.
3 says it will launch LTE next year using two chunks (2×15 MHz) of 1800 MHz spectrum it is buying  from EE, which will double capacity on its network. Ofcom has approved the transaction but the completion of deal is a few months away.
3 says it is the country’s fastest-growing operator, adding 1.04 million customers over the past year to 8.8 million and acquiring 301,000 customers in the last quarter alone.
3 UK CEO Dave Dyson was quoted as saying: “These network improvements are designed to maintain our position as the fastest growing UK mobile operator,†said “Our Ultrafast network is giving more people in more places access to an even faster mobile internet experience.”
The operator says its growth plans are being backed up by an 800-strong recruitment drive that will add nearly 400 sales and service roles at its Glasgow office and 400 across its high street retail stores and Maidenhead office.
At the same time, the operator has shared some really useful info about its customer behaviours with Go Mo News.
Good news to end the working week.
September 7th, 2012
The stories around our WiFi connection crisis continue to build.
Martin Bryant (@MartinSFP), managing editor of The Next Web tweeted this at 10:19 this morning: “Connectivity problems in the IBC Connected World hall. So much competition for bandwidth that even a Bluetooth keyboard doesn’t work.”
For those not in the know about Connected World, the IBC website will enlighten you:
“The lightspeed penetration of internet connected devices and the services that run on them have huge implications for traditional media. Smart phones, games consoles, netbooks, connected TVs and tablets are making content available on demand anywhere and with an unprecedented degree of personalisation.
“Anyone looking to make sense of these changes should head for the IBC Connected World, a special area of IBC which encapsulates the very latest developments in mobile TV, 3G and 4G services with the pioneering applications and technologies that are driving content over-the-top into the home and into our future.â€
Martyn might have been unlucky but it seems more likely that the event connectivity planning did not really “encapsulate†the latest “anywhere†connectivity in mobile.
This news comes hot on the heels of Rory Cellan-Jones telling BBC Radio 4 PM listeners two days ago that the Nokia Lumia launch in New York City was marked by the failure of the network. Read more.
I have been to very few events/conferences in the past three years where there was adequate wireless provision. Even worse, the organisers did not seem that bothered.
But this lack of botherment about WiFi connectivity extends beyond the conference halls and we should be finally losing patience with this.
The Government has announced today that it is relaxing planning restrictions so that telecoms companies can site broadband street cabinets and other infrastructure without the need for prior approval from the local council.
Well, whoop-de-do. That does not help WiFi. We need super-fast wireless connectivity, anytime anywhere – NOW.
Without that, the progressive words of new Culture Secretary Maria Miller are just more hot air.
If she is truly committed to providing a UK-wide network that allows us to compete on a level playing field, Ms Miller must move incredibly quickly on super-fast wireless broadband provision.
Nokia Lumia smartphone launch highlights our WiFi connection crisis
September 5th, 2012
The launch of Nokia’s very impressive Lumia smartphone in New York city underlined for me the WiFi connection crisis we struggle with.
BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones (@ruskin147) was at the launch and told Radio 4 PM listeners that there were a few technical problems, including the failure of the WiFi network.
He was very kind about this, saying that this was to be expected when you assemble 400 journalists in one room.
But, surely, we deserve better than this. Nokia deserves better than this – especially when it is launching a smartphone that connects through wireless.
Event connectivity is not rocket-science. For sure, it is complex and needs expertise, knowledge, careful planning and management.
But this lack of care and attention to detail extends way beyond events and conferences -we have all struggled with inadequate network provision at these events -and into the cities, the railways, the roads, the countryside and beyond.
What we have here is a perfect connectivity disaster, presided over by the government and the telecoms companies. We have had the technology to provide anytime, anywhere fast wireless broadband for more than ten years. WiMax has grown whiskers in the UK while the powers-that-be fiddle at the sidelines.
The Mobile WiMAX standard was deployed in South Korea six years ago and the first-release Long term evolution (LTE) standard has been embedded in Scandinavia since 2009.
In the U.S. Sprint Nextel has deployed Mobile WiMAX networks since 2008, and MetroPCS was the first operator to offer LTE service in 2010. USB wireless modems have been available since the start, while WiMAX smartphones have been available since 2010, and LTE smartphones since 2011.
Currently, we are choking on our competitor nations’ dust.
Meanwhile, at a pace that would be beaten by a snail on gravel, tiny parts of our urban shared spaces are being graced with wireless “hotspots”. Bristol tried to mesh disparate wireless services to become the first UK wired city but that project failed.
Now the government has allowed Everything Everywhere (Orange and T-Mobile) to take the lead in deployment of 4G mobile fast broadband.
Everything Everywhere promises speeds of up to six times the current 3G norm – but anyone who has used 3G knows that the experience is akin to a dial-up 28K modem connection circa 1996 so don’t hold onto your hats.
I do not not pretend to know why exactly we are still in the Internet Stone Age when it comes to wireless connectivity but I’d say that the combination of warring commercial interests and a disinterested government might have something to do with it.
We deserve better than this shambolic procedure. We should demand ultra-fast, anytime anywhere wireless broadband as a right. To paraphrase Robert E. Grant in Withnail and I: “We want the finest wireless broadband available to humanity. We want it here. We want it now.”
I don’t think that is too much to ask. Do you?
Defining the real value of check-in apps
July 27th, 2012
Douglas Karr over at The Marketing Technology Blog has just posted an excellent link blog, which I am shamelessly re-using, it being Friday night an’all – and this is my short post for the week.
I think we’re behind the adoption curve on mobile geographic services in the UK so Doug’s view of his US experience is illuminating. I’ll admit to having approximately zero geo-marketing apps on my iPhone – maybe I should get out more but the need for proximity (and full trust) does not presently match my interests.
Doug’s right, though about the defining the real value of check-in apps. It’s a discussion we all need – businesses both big and less big. I hope it does not get ambushed by regressive marketers who see the opportunity to reinforce one-way, old-school campaigns, a fear that Shel Israel raised recently.
I’d be a founding member of the Shout-Marketing Noise Abatement Society if that were to happen 
Check out Doug’s post and the excellent infographic from Intuit.
Apps continue download success but high retention rates still limited to chosen few
June 29th, 2012
Apps are now fully ingrained in the psyche of the average marketer, so much so that it’s guaranteed apps will feature in a variety of campaign suggestions made by agencies and brands across the globe today.
Since the introduction of the app as we know it today, alongside the launch of the iPhone in 2007, there have been many good examples of useful and valuable apps, and many more poor examples.
As of June 2012, 30 billion apps have been downloaded from the (Apple) App Store and currently more than 650,000 apps are available. Furthermore, in May of this year, Google Play, which sells Android apps, achieved 15 billion downloads from its selection of 500,000 apps.
Therefore, it’s safe to say the app is still a huge success and a vital tool for relevant communications campaigns, but what is the reality of app retention?
To find out, Localytics a mobile analytics firm based in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, has just completed research on the behaviour of consumers on 60 million mobile devices in the U.S., including phones and tablets, across roughly 10,000 apps, as covered in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week.
The research considered all major mobile platforms, including iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and HTML5 and didn’t distinguish between paid and free apps. It chose the metric of opening an app 11 times or more as the high-end metric because that it is the rate at which app publishers consider a user to be loyal or retained, according to Raj Aggarwal, chief executive of Localytics who headed up the research. Although this number seems a little low to me.
The company analysed users who downloaded an app in July 2011 and then counted how many times they opened up the app over a nine-month period ending in March 2012. They discovered around 31% of mobile users opened up their apps at least 11 times or more over a nine-month period, up from 26% a year ago.
However, 69% of users open an app 10 times or less, and over a quarter use the app just once after downloading it, which shows that high usage is the preserve of only the chosen few.
For example, recently Brian Cox’s Wonders of the Universe iPad book-app sold 20,000 copies in its first three days at £4.99 each, which covered its costs straight away. However retention is yet to be measured.
In terms of platforms, around 35% of Apple device users opened their apps 11 times or more, compared to just 23% of Android users.
Unsurprisingly, news apps like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal enjoy the highest retention rate, with 44% of users. Next in line are Gaming (e.g., Angry Birds), Entertainment (e.g., Netflix) and Sports, all of which had retention rates between 33% and 36%. Lifestyle apps, which include both e-commerce and life event planning tools, had the worst user retention with just 15% opening an app 11 times or more and 30% opening an app just once.