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Pew Internet Study a Game-Changer for Mobile Strategy

The Pew Internet & American Life Project recently reported on the proliferation of mobile phone usage in its first-ever standalone survey on this subject. The article, written by Senior Research Specialist, Aaron Smith, lays out some interesting facts about smartphone usage in the United States. Here are some facts and figures the piece provides:

  • 83 percent of U.S. adults have a cell phone of some kind.
  • 42 percent of those adults own a smartphone.
  • That means that overall, 35 percent of Americans own smartphones.
  • There is high adoption of smartphones within the following demographics and communities – the wealthy, the educated, non-whites, and those under the age of 45.
  • 87 percent of smartphone owners use their devices to access the Internet or email, with 68 percent of them saying they do so on a daily basis.

If we combine the fact that the majority of U.S. adults own cell phones with the notion that smartphones are becoming increasingly accessible to the general public, then it is only a matter of time before the former becomes obsolete. In fact, according to Nielsen, smartphones are already outselling their “dumber” counterparts. The company’s May survey indicated that 55 percent of customers who bought a new handset in the past three months reported buying a smartphone instead of a feature phone, which was up from 34 percent  one year ago.

A recent Nielsen study said that 55 percent of those who purchased a new handset in the past three months reported buying a smartphone.

Given these new numbers and what they represent, the mobile strategy game has changed (seemingly overnight). Organizations that are planning to implement a campaign or organize online should definitely take this research seriously because having a mobile strategy is no longer a thing of the future – it’s a thing of right now.


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Mobile Tickets at Nationals Park

When buying Nats tickets a few times this past season, I noticed an option for mobile delivery.  Essentially, you could pay a separate ticketing fee to have your baseball tickets sent directly to your mobile device.  While I admired the sentiment behind paperless ticketing, I couldn’t see a reason to pay an extra fee, so I opted for paper or print at home tickets.  The logic behind charging an extra fee for something that, in theory, should save the ticketing agency money escapes me (how does not having to print and mail tickets cost ME money?), but I digress.

Things changed when I arranged to take my family to one of the last Nats home games this season.  Long story short, my wife was planning to bring our two boys and meet me at the game.  When she arrived, she realized that she had forgotten the tickets.  I’m sure you can imagine the reaction this realization prompted from our 2 and 4 year old boys, who were decked out in Nats gear, and very excited for the game.

But it turns out there was an easy solution.  Luckily, I opted for the print-at-home option when I purchased my tickets.  If I could pull up the ticket images with the bar codes from my email account on my mobile phone, the ushers could scan them with a special reader and issue us paper printouts with our section and seat numbers for the game (the same reader they use for mobile ticket delivery customers).  A couple of minutes later, we were scanned in and heading to our seats.

Disaster averted thanks to some very cool technology.  The problem is, I still doubt I’ll choose the option for paperless mobile delivery as long as the ticketing agency charges an additional fee.  As you can see from my story, you can forgo the mobile ticketing fee, use the print at home option, and know you can use mobile ticketing as a free backup in the event that you lose your printed tickets.


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Flashing in Public

As anyone with an iPhone or iPad knows, Steve Jobs has some major issues with Adobe Flash.  He’s correct in some of his concerns, but in my opinion, he’s currently putting his products (and users) at a disadvantage.  I’m not going to venture into which of his arguments are reasonable, and which are far-fetched.  Apple dictates what its products support, and Steve Jobs dictates what Apple does.  So, what does this mean for the development community?  Over the past few years, Flash has been increasingly billed as the more and more universal platform for developing multimedia.  With support on so many browsers, Flash had a penetration rate that was unrivaled.  Now, Flash development needs to be effectively abandoned, because so many users want to enjoy the content on their mobile devices. When someone looks at a website on an iPhone, and it tells them “Flash is required to view this site,” the site might as well not even exist.  There are some wonderful Javascript libraries out there (jQuery for one) that provide good cross-browser animations.  However, the issue with JavaScript remains that all code is available to anyone who knows how to operate Firebug, once the code is used on a site.  Another issue exists with video.  Flash provides a good, universal platform for delivering video content to users.  HTML5 supports the direct embedding of video in HTML pages, without the need for a browser plug-in.  Not all browsers currently support HTML5, and the ones that do can’t agree on a universal video codec.  So, this still leaves us compressing videos twice.  Ultimately, the move to more open technologies is a good one.  Unfortunately, full support is not quite there, and probably will not be for some time.  Mr. Jobs is making a bold move by trying to expedite the transition, but it’s a little “too soon.”

Steve Jobs – Thoughts on Flash

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