MobileWebsiteWatch

In a fantastic and comprehensive article in the Wall Street Journal today, reporter Nick Wingfield illuminates a very prescient analogy of the mobile world today: in the same way that companies were once eager to deploy laptops to executives and technicians to increase mobility, today smart phones are stepping up to take over that role thanks to the significant advantages they have in power and portability.

This is not to say that the laptop will got eh way of the dodo, but the truth is, more often than not business travelers leave their laptops in hotel rooms and rental cars while going to meetings and about routine business activities armed only with their lighter, and more portable smart phones. These souped-up cousins of ordinary cellphones, with email and other Internet functions, have become much more powerful in the past year.

For years, mobile workers have been ditching their desktop computers for laptops that they can take wherever they go. Now road warriors are starting to realize that they can get even more portability — and lots of computing punch — from smart phones…The result: Many travelers are now using smart phones the way they once used laptops — and laptops the way they once used desktop computers. Mobile workers rely on their laptops to create PowerPoint presentations and do other heavy-duty computing. But then they leave the laptops in their offices, homes or hotel rooms and take their smart phones out into the world.

Many are going even further opting to leave the laptop behind entirely and the demand for mobile devices that can handle more heavy duty business specific applications is huge.  In a report published in January by research firm In-Stat based on a survey of 1,402 technology users, roughly 52% of respondents to the In-Stat survey said they could envision using a smart phone in the future as their sole computing device.

The overall result of this shift toward mobile has obvious implications on the need for mobile web optimization.  For many Software as a Service (SaaS) companies such as Salesforce.com and Netsuite, mobile optimization has become a pressing and urgent need as well as a massive revenue driver.  Salesforce.com offers business people access to its cloud CRM software from their mobile devices with a hefty price tag, starting at about $600 per user/year–almost twice the price of a copy of Micrsoft Office.

When deployed effectively (note keyword “when”), many companies are discovering that these costs are actually a real bargain price for the massive boost in efficiency and employee accessibility to work data.  A study released by the Aberdeen Group highlights some of the advantages and audit-able improvements in efficiency and cost realized by the Salesforce solution. The supporting factor that makes mobile web optimization from both the customer and company standpoint is the explosive growth and demand for services in the mobile market.  THis growth is occurring at a breakneck pace and both has not only executives and emplyee clamouring for more and more services they can access right from their phone but from customers, investors, and interested parties of all types the world throughout.  After all, isn’t each road warrior exec who depends on their Blackberry for everything just another human who also wants: to order food, buy gifts online, book hotels and travel deals, check in on investor relations areas of compaines in their porfolios, get movie/concert tickets, or any of the million other things we all do on the Internet everyday?
Today, smartphone sales well outpace laptops, and that trend is rising faster than the switch from desktop to laptop occurred.  See graph.

With this kind of growth coupled with the rapidly increasing adoption or inclusion of data plans in most mobile contracts (many smartphones like the iPhone and the G1 cannot be used without an unlimited data plan) companies of all sizes can no longer afford not to embrace mobile both internally and externally if they hope to be competitive and in touch with their customer, consumers, employees most importantly, their competitors.

In an article in Adweek yesterday, new findings indicate that the U.S. is expected to become the world’s largest mobile Web user by month’s end, after years of lagging behind European countries.

Data collected by mobile analytics firm Bango indicated that in July, the U.K. was “top ranked in mobile Web usage, accounting for almost 19.4 percent of the worldwide total, just ahead of the U.S., which collected about 18.9 percent of total usage. Rounding out the top five were India (10.8 percent), South Africa (8.8 percent) and Indonesia (4.1 percent).”

But according to Adam Kerr, Bango’s VP, North America, U.S. usage in recent weeks has increased 4 percent while U.K. growth was about 1 percent. When the final numbers are tallied for August, Kerr expects the U.S. to surpass the U.K. in usage with close to a 23 percent share of the total mobile Internet market, leaving the U.K. with slightly more than 20 percent.

As this is an article in AdWeek, it is quick to poitn out that “increased usage will attract more ad dollars to the space, per analysts. For example, eMarketer predicts mobile advertising will grow fourfold from $1.6 billion in 2008 to $6.4 billion in 2012, with Internet video becoming the most lucrative mobile ad channel by 2010.”

This is all well and good but without more widespread adoption of mobile web sites, increased spending on these display ads and messages is really a bit pointless.  Nonetheless, companies in the United States that recognize the surging importance of mobile in the eyes of the US consumer today, and respond by offering optimized access tio their web services will likely stand to benefit the most.