Author: JT

The most recent data report issued by ABI Research sees this technology exploding in 2014.

The latest quarterly market data report from ABI Research has placed a focus on location based marketing technologies and has shown that this year will likely be a powerful one when it comes to indoor installations within retail environments.

The report explains it as a full scale deployment of what early adopters were testing last year.

Now that the last three years have seen considerable testing of location based marketing techniques and technologies by early adopters, they are ready to roll out complete campaigns that will make use of the channel. An additional critical driver in this area is also the rapid increase in the popularity of BLE/iBeacons.

Those forms of location based marketing technology are generating a new wave of adopters in this space.

Now, second generation startups are beginning to drive brand new growth and will be used throughout each of the major verticals. When all is said and done, the report showed that this year will see more than 30,000 indoor location installations, said ABI Research’s data.

Patrick Connolly, a senior analyst with the firm, said that it is easy to spot the way in which large pharmacy and grocery chains have been moving toward this tech. He also added that “These are very competitive verticals, which can benefit significantly from identifying and targeting loyal customers.” Connolly explained that “Both already have large loyalty and advertising/offers deals in place and from a practical point of view, in-store items can be difficult to find. All of this makes indoor location a perfect fit.”

Beyond that, the development of the technology throughout other verticals will be an interesting occurrence over the next few months. For instance, while QSR restaurants had not originally been seen as a prime example of the type of business that would be able to take full advantage of this technology, it is in this area that there have been some of the largest successes.

Some of the differences that location based marketing and tech have been able to achieve for fast food restaurants include a small improvement in the length of lineups. This may sound minor, but in a business of that nature, it can translate to millions of dollars over time.

At the same time, surfing the web over smartphones has started to decline.

Recent news about the use of mobile apps from Furry, an analytics provider, has shown that the usage of native applications over smartphones is continuing to rise, but it is doing so at the expense of the use of the web.

The data from the company showed users spend an average of 2 hours and 42 minutes on their devices each day.

This usage, which was accurate as of March 2014, represents a notable growth, as the same figure a year beforehand had been 2 hours and 38 minutes. Of that time, the usage of mobile apps represents 2 hours and 19 minutes. Equally, the amount of time spent surfing the mobile web has dropped in the United States, from having been 20 percent of the time spent on those devices in 2013 to only 14 percent, this year. This means that only 22 minutes per day are being spent on surfing.

This could suggest that the influence and attraction of mobile apps is growing among consumers.

According to Simon Khalaf, the CEO of Flurry, these changes suggest that the mobile browser is only one of a large number of other applications on a mobile device. He explained that a browser on a smartphone is “a single application swimming in a sea of apps.” The data that Flurry gathered in order to make this conclusion was from its network that represents more than 450,000 smartphone applications. Those apps are installed on more than 1.3 billion devices located around the globe.

At the same time, it used comScore for the data regarding the use of apps and browsers, and it used NetMarketShare in order to determine the distribution of the usage of mobile browsers. This means that as interesting as the claims from Flurry may be, it is combining data from several sources which each have their own methodologies. While this does not indicate that the data is necessarily inaccurate, there is no way to verify the accuracy of what it suggests, either.

The report also looked into the types of mobile apps that were the most popular and determined that gaming is still the category with the greatest usage, representing 32 percent of the time spent on smartphones. Facebook was in second place at 17 percent.