Don't Buck the Smartphone trend.

Cell phones are taking over the web.  Pay attention.

I wanted to discuss some of the latest trends in web development.  In reality, I want to recap with my readers what Mary Meeks said during her annual Internet trends address.  Mary has been at this for a while and she is considered the source for internet metrics. What she illustrates is what I have been saying for some time.  If you ignore the mobile web you are taking a huge risk with your business.

If you want to see the report yourself, you can view all slides here.  Here is my take from the discussion.  First, the total amount of time we spend on the internet is 22% of our media viewing time.  Additionally, we spend 12% of our free time on the mobile web.   This means we spend roughly a third of our free time on the internet either via a browser or the mobile web.  This is market share is growing and has the potential for 20 Billion dollars in advertising revenue.  That is only on slide five.

The next major slide is number 32 which shows that current internet traffic is on mobile devices about 15% of all web requests.  That number is expected to double to 30% by 2014.  This means that a third of your corporate web traffic in the next year is going to reach your website via a mobile device.  If your web site cannot adapt to this new form of traffic it is like turning away a third of your customers.  As a small or medium sized business do you really want to turn away a third of your customers?

The final trend you need to be aware of is that the adoption of smart phones continues to grow at a scary pace.  Currently the percentage of smart phones currently in circulation represents about 58% of the total market for cellular phones.  The growth of the smart phone adoption is also fairly large at 28%.  So, smart phones already eclipse ordinary cellular phones and the adoption rate remains high. This means that as a business you are going to have to adjust to more consumers learning about your business via a mobile device.

Already we are seeing this internet usage cause some problems in the business world.  Zynga the on-line game company is going through a second round of lay-offs cutting 18% of its staff.  The reason why is that they are not growing quickly enough in their mobile gaming offerings while traffic for their on-line games is decreasing.  Salon magazine noted that companies like Viggle as attempting to capture the second screen phenomena where people surf the net and watch television at the same time.  Why is there a company like Viggle?  I claim that it is because of the rise of mobile computing.

So as a small and medium sized business, you have two choices; you can ignore these trends and hope for the best or attempt to modify your web presence to take advantage of these trends.  At E₃ systems we did a major site revision to account for these trends.  We can help you do the same.  Contact us today and we will show you how.

The web is never a static thing and this year’s state of the web speech shows some pretty serious trends.  To ignore them is put your business at risk, and you wouldn't want do that would you?

Until next time.