Blogger asymco did a little calculating from last week’s announcement numbers, and has hammered out a rough estimate of just how many of each iDevice are floating around the world today. According to Steve at last week’s event, there are 120 million iDevices total in the world, and we already knew from SEC filings that 59.6 million of those were iPhones. The current number of iPads in the hands of customers around world is 3.2 million, which (with estimates for the past month on both of those devices added in), means that there are likely 45.2 million iPod touches around. That’s 37.7% of iOS devices at large — not as big as it used to be, as the iPad’s arrival shook things up a bit, but still a very significant total.

Your apps need to work without a network connection, or you’re missing almost 40% of the iOS handheld market.

At eTail in Baltimore today, Abhi Dhar, CTO Walgreens provoked the crowd saying, “Consumers have changed because of mobile. Deal with it.”

[...]Retailer after retailer asked the question, “Should I do mobile web or native apps?” It was deja vu all over again. It’s the same debate mobile bankers had early last year. Abhi Dahl said “BOTH are very important.” I agree.

In mobile banking, we’ve found that banks must offer all three technologies: Mobile web, SMS, and native applications. Many retailers are still resisting hoping to avoid the fragmentation bankers have resigned themselves to.

David Siegel of 1-800-FLOWERS said, “Don’t try to change customer behavior, market to where they are.”

Customers look for brands using their mobile browser. Retailers should have a mobile site. Customers look for brands in their phone’s app store. Brands should have an app.

Companies resisting building a strategy addressing channel fragmentation are just wasting time and ceding market share to their competitors. Many retailers, including 1-800-FLOWERS said that mobile web accounted for over half their mobile sales. The many mobile web proponents I spoke with seemed to consider this evidence that mobile web is the “right” way to do mobile.

My opinion on this stat is that companies only offering mobile web are potentially missing out on 50% of mobile sales. Maybe these users would buy on mobile web if the native app weren’t available. Maybe. Remember, Apple had to create the App Store in response to overwhelming jailbreaking of the iPhone because Apple insisted mobile web was all we needed.

[...]As Jeff Dennes of USAA said, “If you don’t have enough [mobile] budget, get a bigger budget.”

Now is the time for companies to aggressively commit to mobile and emerge the market leader.

Customers are making decisions using their mobile phone. It’s up to retailers to decide to serve their customers.

It is all well and good owning a mobile phone with GPS, tons of travel apps, but when it costs you £3 – £5 per MB to use the internet abroad, it becomes expensive very quickly. Last week I used my phone in-flight, while jaunting around New York and I have arrived home to a £60 bill for roaming charges.

[read more]

The BBC also wrote about this earlier this year:

If you use your phone in the UK to connect to the internet, for example to check emails or go on Facebook, you don’t usually need to worry about the bill – most home tariffs include unlimited downloads.

But, if you take a smartphone, like an iPhone, on your travels, it can have expensive consequences.

One German man was reported to have been charged £41,000 after downloading a television programme onto his phone.

Julia Feuell, from north London, also got a shock after a visit to New Zealand. Her 17 year-old son racked up a bill of £590.

If you’re creating iPhone apps,  it’s critical that your app doesn’t have an expensive network dependency. If it can’t run in “Airplane Mode”, it doesn’t work for travelers (and you’re missing out on other great benefits).

• there’s now 45 million smartphone users in the US, up 21% in the last 3 months
• Google/Android is the big winner, having over doubled its market share to 9% over the last quarter
• RIM and Apple hold stead in terms of share, meaning their absolute numbers are still growing
• Microsoft and Palm are the big losers, and are likely to continue to do so

Discover Anywhere Mobile notes:

• the rapid adoption rate of smartphones is a sign that many people are choosing to replace their cell phones with something more modern: expect smartphones to dominate the market in the next 2 to 3 years
• we expect Apple to start growing market share again after they release a version that does not depend on the AT&T network
• Palm blew it
• Microsoft will make a recovery next year after Windows Mobile 7 becomes available, but not until its share drops to Palm-like numbers

As smartphones like the iPhone and Android take over the mobile Web, the amount of data traffic going over cellular networks is expected to grow 40-fold over the next five years. UK firm Coda Research Consultancy forecasts that in the U.S. alone mobile handset data traffic will grow from 8 petabytes/month this year to 327 petabytes/month in 2015. That amounts to a 117 percent compound annual growth rate.

We’d also like to draw attention to the following table:

	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015
Mobile Internet users via handsets	84M	100M	113M	128M	145M	158M
Smartphone traffic as % of handset traffic	79%	90%	95%	97%	98%	98%
Feature phone traffic as % of handset traffic	21%	10%	5%	3%	2%	2%

Next year, 90% of “data traffic” over the next year will be from smartphones. The implications:

• WAP-type protocols are effectively dead, except for legacy applications,
• everyone interested in accessing Internet services are going to replace their “normal” cell with a smartphone in the very near future.

The latest AdMob numbers tell the story:

AdMob serves north of 10 billion ads per month to more than 15,000 mobile websites and applications. Thus, although its data is about ad rather than page impressions, it can be taken as a pretty robust indicator of how web usage habits are developing and changing over time. Android is the big standout of its most recent figures, with Google loyalists now constituting a cool 42 percent of AdMob’s smartphone audience in the US.

Given the trend lines, the Android’s probably in the #1 position by now and is likely to maintain it, at least until Apple introduces a version of the iPhone that’s not dependent on the somewhat flaky AT&T cellular network.

• Finger Lakes Wine Country (released March 9, 2010)
• Ocean City, MD (released February 17, 2010)
• Central Nova Scotia (AR release Feb 16, 1010)
• Destination St. John’s (released Nov 17, 2009)

All these apps are actually available in the app store right now; many more are in the pipeline. In addition, many other app makers in the Travel sector offer Augmented Reality (and the dates given here are for their latest releases, earlier versions no doubt had these features too) :

• Wikitude (Feb 11, 2010)
• Canada Eye (March 3, 2010)
• Metro Paris Subway (Feb 1, 2010)
• Bionic Eye (Feb 5, 2010)

One application that may reasonable lay claim to being first into the AR travel market is Yelp, who cleverly snuck an Easter egg into their application before Apple officially allowed AR to be supported in August of 2009. There are also a number of Asian travel apps which offer integrated Augmented Reality.

We’re happy for TripWolf that they’ll soon be offering a feature that was available from the rest of the market 6 months ago (FYI: it takes Apple less than three days to approve an app these days). We look forward to their announcement, perhaps someday, of them being the first to offer comprehensive social media integration into their products.

If you are researching a trip to Italy, or want to learn about wines in the region or even just keep track of calories and new recipes while you’re away,”there’s an App for that.” It is important to acknowledge that phrase has now become common vernacular among iphone users just as “Google It” has to the entire population. With a current user base of 1.5 million iphone users and 1.2 Million Ipod Touch users in Canada alone [don't forget the iPod Touch - not all app developers really support this and it's almost half your market -- dpj] (Mobile Fringe), 2010 just may be your “app-ortunity” to launch a mobile marketing strategy.

Why now [to integrate mobile into this year’s marketing budget for Travel, Tourism and Hospitality professionals]? According to Sorge you cannot ignore the facts. “Mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access devices worldwide by 2013”, states Sorge, “In addition Mobile marketing will grow to $19 billion by 2012 from $1.6 billion in 2008.” Add to that better data plans being offered by cellular providers making web access from you mobile affordable and the solid distribution Apple has created with the App Store following in the itunes successful footsteps. iPhone and iTouch have over 60 million users that consume over 200 million apps per month – and now there is the iPad recently launched which is the happy medium between the two.

[...] Now is the time to jump in when costs are affordable and before the market gets cluttered with too much noise. In saying that, the same principles apply to every other marketing strategy – ensure first that your marketing budget is allocated to where your customers are RIGHT NOW – don’t go building an app for your ski destination if the website can’t be found when your customers are looking to book, or if your website is not even transacting business already.

[...] The cost? You can get an app created for as little as $5000 [even a good one -- dpj] depending on who is developing your app, and what you want to do. Don’t look at mobile in isolation, it should be integrated to your overall marketing strategy and be consistent in messaging with your website, search, email newsletters, blogs and social media initiatives.

Our take: apps aren’t the new search, they’re the new domain name. If you remember way back when to the 1990′s:

• the good domain names get taken early (try and get a short, meaningful domain name now)
• it’s much easier to be a winner if you’re in early, rather than be in late (Yahoo)
• great technology still matters (Google)

If you’d like to find out more about A Couple Of Chicks e-Marketing, there’s a profile on YongeStreet magazine: Hatching an Idea. If you’d like to find out more about moving your Travel, Tourism, CVB/DMO site onto mobile, well, contact us!

Buying and selling tickets is another business that’s slowly being migrated over to our mobile devices. Whether it’s a movie ticket, concert ticket, plane ticket, or something else, there are a number of companies now offering digital alternatives to the tree-killing paper printouts of days past. In a new study by Juniper Research, analysts predict that the market for mobile ticketing will reach 15 billion delivered tickets by the year 2014. According to Juniper, a little over 2 billion tickets were sold this past year. That makes the forecast of 15 billion by 2014 a notable jump which points to consumers’ ever-increasing desire to perform business transactions like mobile ticket purchases using their mobile phones and other handheld devices.

From Tnooz:

The annual Cybersource UK Online Fraud Report, which surveys both companies and consumers, inevitably focused on website-based issues – a third of online merchants seeing an increase in business lost to fraud – but threw in the nugget of negativity on one of its last pages.Responses to the question “Would you use your mobile to purchase online?” were as follows:

• 78% – No, never.
• 8% – Yes, would consider it.
• 4% – Yes, would definitely.
• 10% – Do not own a mobile.

From EMarketer (via PhoCusWright):

Coupon usage was up in 2009 overall, and mobile coupon redemption is poised to explode over the next few years. But mobile couponing is still in the early stages of adoption, as indicated in a Honeywell survey conducted by Harris Interactive in December 2009.

Just 4% of Internet users surveyed said they had redeemed mobile coupons, compared with 86% who had clipped paper coupons and 65% who had used electronic coupons from the Internet or e-mail. Younger adults were most interested in mobile coupons, with 66% saying they were at least somewhat likely to try them.

Most Web users, however, were not yet ready to join the bandwagon. Only 10% felt comfortable storing coupons on their mobile phone rather than printing them out, and one-half that number wanted retailers to text them about deals and sales. Across the board, younger respondents and those with higher incomes had more positive attitudes toward mobile coupon use.

Go figure. Our take is here on Tnooz – we’re at the early adopter stage, when everyone starts using it, everyone will start using it! With regards to mobile coupons, I assume the issue is convenience at this point: the coupons aren’t where we need them to be when we’re at the point-of-sale.

If you’re interested in finding out more about what DAM does, have a look around the website and give us a call for a demo. We have the first, the most compelling and the best priced mobile solution for getting CVB/DMOs mobile in the market.

When will location-based services stop being fads and start getting real?

Sponsored by Wired, the talk featured panelists who all work on projects where users share information online, whether it be their location or answers posed by online users. And while gaming and social aspects have driven user rates to date, wider adoption dependson utility.

Chris Dixon, CEO and cofouner of Hunch, thinks it all comes down to Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma:

“One of the key characteristic of new disruptive technology is that it starts out looking like a toy. That’s so often why big companies ignore and dismiss it.”

But the big hurdle for start-ups is to get users play with and use their tools on a daily basis. Dixon divides people into two groups for these purposes: “techies” and “normals.” Many new digital tools are quickly adopted by techies, but “when it becomes critical infrastructure is when it crosses over to the normals,” he says.

With adoption of location-based tools, things are just getting started. The tipping point will be when people start depending on the store of information they provide on a daily basis.

Tony Jebara, associate professor of Computer Science at Columbia University & Chief Scientist at Sense Networks, puts it this way:

“When you’re in a new city, you have to start from scratch. And you realize how much better off you are with these tools.“

It’s exactly then, when services become personally useful, that people start saying “maybe my phone should be tracking me,” says Dennis Crowley, co-founder of mobile check-in service Foursquare.

If you’re interested in finding out more about what DAM does, have a look around the website and give us a call for a demo. We have the first, the most compelling and the best priced mobile solution for getting CVB/DMOs mobile in the market.