Tag: mobile app trends

Mobile technology is generating massive savings for small businesses

| May 23, 2014

Smartphones have become the standard in smaller companies and are generating $65 billion in annual savings.

It has now reached the point that nearly all small businesses are using mobile technology in the form of smartphones, with 94 percent claiming that they are using them, this year, which is still a notable increase over the high level that was recorded last year, at 85 percent.

Millions of small to midsized businesses (SMBs) across the United States are taking advantage of the tech.

These SMBs are using the smartphones to be able to save a considerable amount of time and money. A recent survey which was commissioned jointly by AT&T and by the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council (SBE Council) estimated that every year this mobile technology is saving SMBs $67.5 billion. This includes not only the use of the mobile devices, themselves, but also tablets and apps.

The survey looked into both the time and the money saved by the use of mobile technology.

Among all of the different types of mobile tech, smartphones alone are saving small to midsized businesses the largest amount of money ($32.3 billion) and even time (at an estimated 1.24 billion hours). Tablets came in second, with a savings of $19.6 billion per year and an estimated 754.2 million hours. Mobile apps are saving $15.6 billion per year and an estimated 599.5 million hours.Mobile Technology for small businesses

According to Karen Kerrigan, the CEO and council president of SBE, “Clearly, we are at a point where entrepreneurs now look first to communications technologies and innovations for solutions to improve productivity, cut costs and better manage and engage with customers.” She added that this is money and time that can all be redirected back into the business and improving market innovation while boosting sales.

The report on the study showed that over half of all small businesses say that they are currently using mobile technology in the form of apps. Among those who are using applications, 91 percent say that they use them for time savings, while two out of every three claim that money is being saved in this way.

Mobile apps are increasing in use

| April 14, 2014

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.

Mobile apps increasing in useAccording 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.