IDC: 8 Stats Why the Post-PC, Mobile Era Is Upon Us

Eric Lai | Mar 16, 2011

Big market researchers are rarely at the forefront of tech trends, as they must balance the viewpoints of startups, established vendors and enterprise IT buyers.

What firms like Gartner and IDC excel at is being a belwether for emerging trends, and providing empirical validation for them.

At its Directions 2011 conference in San Jose today, IDC Corp. analysts argued that we are entering the post-PC era of computing overflowing with data, devices and apps.

Ironically, this is a drum that SAP has been banging loudly for the past year. And gratifyingly, it is nearly identical to the Unwired Enterprise vision that Sybase has promoted since the middle of the last decade (see this whitepaper, which I had a hand in, summarizing this vision).

Here are some of the stats IDC shared, along with the implications.

1. Stat: It is 25 years (1986) since the industry began moving en masse towards client/server away from mainframes.

Implication: We are at similar transition from PC-server towards mobile devices. Already, there are “trillions of smart ‘things’ (sensors, devices, etc.), billions of users, millions of apps,” says Frank Gens, chief analyst for IDC.

2. Stat: 3 of the biggest companies that failed to transition to client-server were Cullinet (database maker that avoided new retailing model), Wang (word processor maker that chose CPU ignored by software developers) and Digital (overvalued by Wall Street).

Implication: Companies that made right moves made the leap: Dell (sold PCs by phone), EMC (took regular hard disks into the enterprise) and SAP (brought ERP from mainframe to client-server).

3. Stat: 80% of new enterprise apps to be distributed via the cloud. By 2014, 30% of enterprise application spending will be on the cloud.

Implication: Even enterprise apps will follow Apple’s App Store model, argues Gens.

4. Stat: There are 1.3 million mobile apps today, versus 50,000 to 75,000 PC applications, says Gens.

Implication: Most new apps will be vertical or industry-specific solutions.

5. Stat: 1.8 Zettabytes (1.8 billion TERABYTES) of data will be stored in 2011, up 47% year-over-year. That will grow to 7 Zettabytes in 2014.

Implication: “This is about BIG data,” says Gens, not relational databases. “This BREAKS traditional databases.”

6. Stat: 500 million smartphones and tablets to sell in 2011, versus 380 million PCs.

Implication: This is the transition year in which devices will pass PCs permanently.

7. Stat: Only 50% of smartphones and 20% of tablets in enterprise bought by IT, according to fall 2010 IDC survey.

Implication: Bring Your Own Device is huge, says IDC analyst Bob O’Donnell, and managers will need to account for that.

8. Stat: Worldwide, the average affluent consumer owns 4.8 devices, according to a recent IDC survey. In the US, that is up to 6.6 devices.

Implication: The market is hugely fragmented.

View Original Article: B2C

More information on the AutoMotionTV Dealer App.

Why clicks don’t work in a mobile world

March 3, 2011

Zephrin Lasker is CEO of Pontiflex

By Zephrin Lasker

In an August 2010 article in Wired Magazine, Chris Anderson proclaimed that the Internet as we know it is dead.

“Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semi-closed platforms (apps) that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing.”

The Internet, Mr. Anderson concludes, is “less about the searching and more about the getting.”

Jobs throws book
Smartphone adoption rates have greatly increased the use of mobile applications.

According to Morgan Stanley, Internet mobile adoption rates are ramping up faster than the desktop Internet did, and the number of smartphone users is increasing exponentially.

The shift in consumer habits has led to mobile quickly becoming a must-buy for advertisers.

But capitalizing on the proliferation of mobile apps via advertising is easier said than done.

A large number of mobile advertising solutions today rely on click-based online display banners.

Yet click-based units do not create user-friendly experiences on mobile devices.

Steve Jobs recognized this problem when launching Apple’s mobile platform, iAd.

“Today when you click on a banner ad, it yanks you out of your app and throws you onto the advertiser’s Web page,” Mr. Jobs said at the 2010 iOS conference. “So people don’t click on the ads.”

Mobile ads that force people out of an app and take them to a clunky Web browser offer a sub-optimal user experience.

For this reason, the last year or so has seen the rise of in-app advertising solutions that aim to address this problem and engage users directly within apps.

According to Borrell Associates, the in-app mobile advertising market will rocket to $8 billion by 2015.

Two do
Today, there are primarily two types of in-app advertising solutions.

The first focuses on delivering a TV commercial-like experience.

Apple’s iAds platform, which delivers a branded experience in mobile app environments, is an example of this kind of ad.

IAd offers a deep branding experience at the moment of engagement and brands such as AT&T, BMW, Campbell, Dove and Nissan have used this model to engage consumers within mobile apps on the Apple iTunes store.

The second half of 2010 saw the launch of a new kind of in-app advertising on both the Android and iPhone platforms – mobile signup ads.

Mobile signup ads work by presenting users with a simple sign-up form where they can opt in to receive email communications from brands.

The advertiser then engages the user with branding messages after the initial touch point – via email, Facebook or Twitter.

Major brands such as the ASPCA, Tommy Hilfiger and Tiger Direct use signup advertising to deliver relevant deals and information to their prospect bases.

In-app mobile advertising may very well be what marketers need to finally kick the click.

Both iAds and mobile signup ads will allow marketers to measure mobile ad campaigns using more meaningful metrics than the abstract click-through.

With iAds, marketers can measure brand engagement metrics.

With signup ads, they can measure the number of people who have signed up and the quality of these signups, in addition to measuring how consumers respond over a lifetime via email or Facebook.

In both cases, the marketer gets a more meaningful view of the campaign and how consumers perceive their brand.

The jury is still out on whether click-based advertising works in the online world, but one thing is certain: the click-reliant model definitely will not work in the mobile world.

Zephrin Lasker is CEO of Pontiflex, New York. Reach him atzlasker@pontiflex.com.

View Original Article: Mobile Marketer