virtualmusic.TV » smartphones

2011 Mobile Internet Usage

Ryan Van Etten — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 06:36:59 +0000

Over the past year (and longer) Luke Wroblewski (@lukew) has been tracking mobile usage and posting lots and lots of statistics. The overall trend is undeniable: mobile is exploding. If you need convincing, scroll on down. Luke is a leading thinker in the mobile space, well known for popularizing the concept of mobile-first design, and he is great at helping people understand just why mobile matters. (The headers below link to his original posts.)

NOV

55% of Twitter’s traffic comes from mobile devices. (source)
60% of Pandora’s traffic comes from mobile devices. (source)
54% of The Weather Channel’s October page views came from mobile devices. (source)
Movie ticketing service Fandango is getting close with 40% of their traffic on mobile. (source)
Facebook is also on it’s way with 33% of total traffic on mobile. (source)

NOV

Adult mobile users who have downloaded an app to their phone nearly doubled in the past two years – rising from 22% in September 2009 to 38% in August 2011. (source)
The average iOS device owner will download 83 apps in 2011 vs. 51 in 2010, a 61% increase year over year. (source)
A US/UK study found that the average smartphone user adds just 2.5 new apps per month. (source)
In March 2011, 26% of all apps downloaded were opened only once and then never used again. 26% were used 11 times or more. Of the remaining 48% of apps: 13% are opened only twice, 9% are opened only three times, all the way to 2% that are opened 10 times and never again. (source)
38%  iOS & Android users stick with an app after one month. 14%  iOS & Android users stick with an app after six months. After 12 months, only 4% are left. (source)
Roughly half (51%) of mobile owners use a handful of apps at least once a week, while 17% report using no apps on a regular basis. Almost a third (31%) could be called app “power users” in that they use 6 or more. (source)
The top 10 Android apps account for 43% of all the time spent by Android consumers on mobile apps. The top 50 apps account for 61% of all time spent. (source)

OCT

From the second quarter of 2010 to the second quarter of 2011, mobile data traffic more than doubled. (source)
Research suggests that the industry will go from six billion connections today to more than 12 billion by 2020. (source)
In North America, high-end smartphones generate twice the traffic of comparable smartphones in Asia and Europe. (source)
Almost half of UK internet users are going online via mobile phone data connections in UK. (source)
While 71% of 16 to 24-year-old who went online in the UK said they used mobile broadband, just 8% of UK internet users aged over 65 made use of mobile broadband. (source)
The mobile media user population in the US (those who browse the mobile web, access applications, or download content) grew 19 percent in the past year to more than 116 million people at the end of August 2011. (source)
72.2 million Americans accessed social networking sites or blogs on their mobile device in August 2011, an increase of 37 percent in the past year. (source)
Nearly 40 million US mobile users, more than half of the mobile social media audience, accesssocial networking sites or blogs almost every day. (source)

OCT

In 2009, 1% of Dungarees’ (an apparel retailer) web traffic was from smartphones. In 2010 it grew to 4% and this year it’s at 8%. (source)
JetBlue Airways’ smartphone Web traffic is at 10%. Crutchfield’s is at 12%. And Fandango’s is at a hefty 40%. (source)
The increase in shopping on Gap’s mobile site is one of the major reasons why the site tripled its online conversions in the last year. (source)
Blue Nile sold a diamond ring that cost more than $300,000 via mobile and sees large jewelry purchases, running from a few thousand to tens of thousands of dollars, via smartphones happen quite frequently. (source)
eBay is on its way to process around $4 billion in mobile sales in 2011, double the number it logged last year. Three purchases are made through eBay’s mobile applications every second. 2,600 vehicles are purchased through eBay’s core iPhone apps every week. 13 pieces of clothing, shoes or accessories are sold every minute through eBay’s mobile apps. (source)
It’s not just buyers using eBay’s apps. As of September 2011, eBay sellers are listing over 700,000 new items through their mobile applications on a weekly basis. (source)

SEP

Slightly more Americans (36.4%) use their mobile browser than access applications (34.4%). (source)
More than 700,000 people use the Financial Times’ Web-based mobile application to access news and other content, making it more popular than the version sold in Apple’s App Store. (source)
Facebook’s top mobile client is m.facebook.com (Facebook’s mobile Web site) with 18% of total new Facebook posts. Android, iPhone, and Blackberry are next each with about 4% of total new Facebook posts. (source)
Twitter’s top mobile client is m.twitter.com (Twitter’s mobile Web site) with 14% of total unique users. SMS is next with 8% of total unique users. Then Twitter for iPhone (8%) followed by Twitter for Blackberry (7%). (source)

SEP

Worldwide mobile data traffic is due to increase 26-fold to 75 exabytes annually. That’s the equivalent of 75 times the amount of global Internet IP data in the year 2000. (source)
Mobile data traffic is now outpacing fixed broadband traffic. Last year, it grew 4.2 times as fast. (source)
By 2015 more U.S. Internet users will access the Internet through mobile devices than through PCs or other wireline devices. (source)
25% of U.S. smartphone owners, about 22 million Americans, say that they mostly go online using their phone, rather than with a computer. (source)
The average U.S. mobile data user will be consuming 675MB of data per month by the end of this year. (source)
Almost half of UK internet users are going online via mobile phone data connections. (source)
22-25% of US and UK mobile Internet browsers never or infrequently use the desktop Internet. (source)
More than 50% of Asian and African mobile internet users as well as more than 20% of users in developed markets, such as the UK and US do not use the internet on a PC. (source)
In India 49% of people who are using the mobile Internet either never, or infrequently, access the Internet from a computer. (source)

JUL

Games continue to be the most popular smartphone app category. (source)
93% of app downloaders are willing to pay for the games they play. In contrast, 76% of downloaders are willing to pay for news apps. (source)
The average mobile gamer plays an average of 7.8 hours a month. (source)
Those with iPhones tend to play around 14.7 hours each month while those with Android smartphones play around 9.3 hours per month. (source)
Apple’s iOS is the most popular gaming platform on the planet. There are more than 100,000 game and entertainment titles in the App Store. (source)
In just 9 months Apple has over 50 million Game Center users. To put that into perspective Xbox Live has been around for about eight years and they have around 30 million users. (source)

JUN

After the Verizon iPhone launched in the U.S., Android suffered its first quarterly decline. Apple’s share of the U.S. smartphone market gained 12.3% to 29.5% in the March quarter while Android’s share in the U.S. fell from 52.4% to 49.5% — its first sequential loss in any region of the world since early 2009. (source)
Mobile devices, led by the iPad and Android phones and tablets, have overtaken computers on Wi-Fi networks. In 2010, Windows and Mac OS X accounted for 64% of devices that accessed Wi-Fi networks, while iOS accounted for 32% and Android was just 1%. A year later, iOS and Android now represent 58% of Wi-Fi devices, while Windows and Mac OS X account for 36%. (source)
The iPhone was the most popular device on Wi-Fi networks, with a 32% share. Android accounted for 11% of devices, equal to the iPod touch alone. (source)
The iPad represents 89% of tablet traffic across all markets. In the US the figure is 97%. Apple has sold roughly 25 million iPads to date globally. (source)
January to March 2011, 37% of mobile subscribers in the US used Apps, and 39% used a mobile browser. (source)

APR

In December 2009, Morgan Stanley Research released their Mobile Internet Report that boldly predicted global shipments of smartphones would surpass global shipments of desktops, notebooks, and laptops sometime in 2012. That transition happened almost two years early as global shipments of smartphones and tablets surpassed shipments of desktop PCs and notebooks in Q42010. This gap is expected to increase over the next few years. (source)
Home usage of the PC is down 20% since 2008. As people use smartphones for more simple computing tasks like web surfing, they use traditional PCs less. (source)
Worldwide PC shipments fell 3.2% during the first quarter of 2011 the first year-over-year quarterly decline since the end of the Great Recession. In the U.S. shipments were down 10% in the quarter. Media tablets are capturing a portion of the consumer spending that previously went toward traditional computers. (source)
22-25% of US and UK mobile Internet browsers never or infrequently use the desktop Internet. (source)
In about a month or so, Apple’s iPhone 4 will become the most popular camera used to take pictures uploaded to Flickr. The current most popular camera the Nikon D90 is nearly three years old. The iPhone 4 is not even a year old. (source)

Oh wait my phone is ringing ;]

Sound Around: 2 Bros, 1 Mission.

Ryan Van Etten — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 20:54:16 +0000

Sound Around: iPhone apps for bands.

Gee, Scott, what do you want to do tonight? The same thing we do every night, Steve—try to help music take over the world by building better mobile apps for bands and their fans!

In 2009, in a little place called Raleigh, North Carolina, brothers Scott and Steve Klein had been brainstorming tech startup ideas. Both were students at NC State, but with opposite majors—nearly yin and yang. Add entrepreneurial DNA, and they’re Pinky and The Brain. Scott (Brain) was preparing to graduate as a computer engineer, and his younger brother, Steve (Pinky), was studying business management/marketing. Their startup would be born, but the question was, what kind? Taking advantage of their student resources, they had access to mentoring and networking through the NCSU Engineering Entrepreneurs Program.

Pinky and The Brain: Scott and Steve Klein.

They started 2bros1blog.com to blog about what they learned on the startup road. Many early ideas were solutions aimed towards the university community. Scott had learned Objective-C, the programming language for iPhone apps, and they decided they really wanted to get involved with mobile apps. Everyone has a phone, and they always have it with them, right? But they needed to find the right niche. They thought about campus sports or news apps, but when they proposed building a news app for the college paper, they were met with perplexed stares. Scott and Steve realized that for their app service to fly, they needed to find people that were really interested in expanding and engaging their audience. Being music fans themselves, they took what seemed to be a logical turn that summer—towards musicians. Next stop, Sound Around.

December 11, 2009 from Steve: What have I been up to for the past 4 months? Customer development. I’ve been talking with bands, bloggers and record labels trying to validate that there’s a market for this. The results have been satisfying. Record labels range from sufficiently interested to overjoyed at the prospect of their band getting their very own iPhone application. It almost seems trivial to me because we’ve been talking about the idea for the last 6 months. But to them it’s like a dream come true.

Scott graduated in December, gave a speech, and started a job at an TransLoc—a startup that provides realtime location information to mass-transit users. He built their iPhone app. At the same time he and Steve (who was still in school and working part-time in Macaroni Grill) were developing what would soon be called Sound Around. At the turn of 2010, they took on 15 bands as closed-beta testers. In February Steve learned the ins and outs of web design and built getsoundaround.com.

With people skills and resourcefulness, they’d bootstrapped their expenses so far, but in early 2010 they got involved with TechStars in an effort to raise seed capital. In March they flew to Boulder and found themselves surrounded by like minds in the tech scene. Of 600 startups, TechStars funds only 10. Sound Around made it to the top 27 but not the final 10, and it was back to bootstrapping.

March 7, 2010 from Scott: This weekend was an absolute whirlwind of data points about our idea, the target market, team dynamics, future of the product—we talked about it all. We talked about it all with some of the brightest minds we’ve met to date. Raleigh isn’t necessarily a breeding ground for software startup people; you can imagine our fascination with the warm tech scene that Boulder had to offer. They just get it.

In a typical college scenario, the two brothers were living in a 4-bedroom apartment with two other students—David and A.J.—but when David moved out to live with his fiancé, Scott and Steve commandeered the empty room and converted it into a workspace—their current headquarters.

Having success with the beta apps, they started recording videos to demo the Sound Around platform, and, in the meantime started the application process for funding through another (more local) startup incubator, called LaunchBox Digital…which pretty much brings us to the present. Last night was a milestone for Sound Around. Their first apps were approved by Apple and are now live in the App Store. The party was on, but it’s only the beginning for Sound Around.

Scott is on a 3-month sabbatical from his job at TransLoc to focus full-time on Sound Around. Steve would love to be able to dropout next semester and get Sound Around rolling without distractions. Funding would help them “scale faster” but with or without it they’re expecting to launch in public beta this summer. They considering finding a 3rd team member experienced in web and/or Android dev.

The ‘band apps as a service’ market is a wide-open frontier. There’s some fundamental characteristics about Sound Around that really make them stand out.

1. It’s the DIY mindset. Sound Around’s young, two-brother team is the core of all their development. They’re building it all from the ground up. By not hiring out their programming or design, they’ll be able to constantly address feedback and improve their platform. When demands of the app market change, they’ll be able to adapt the fastest.

2. Sound Around purely focused on developing apps for bands/musicians. They’re not leaving the music niche—immense as it is—and they plan on rocking it. MobBase is their only direct competition right now, and there’s plenty of room to coexist in this space.

3. In what I’ve learned about Scott and Steve, I can tell that they understand the importance of people in the mix. They plan on creating an interface for interaction—not one-way communication—and they have a lot of innovative ideas on deck.

4. Their pricing is user-focused. It’s not based on installs. Bands pay based on the number of fans that actually use the app each month. The starter $14/month plan covers 1000 unique app users per month. Above 1000 is $0.01/user until the next tier—$29/month for 5000 unique users.

5. Their mascot is a giraffe named Shirley. She’ll make you smile. :) Giraffes are a symbol of evolution, you know. She doesn’t always travel with the team of course, who’ll be attending events this summer, including Warped Tour in Charlotte, and would love to meet up.

// update // October 19, 2010 from Scott:

I know it hasn’t been very long since we officially launched back in July, but we’ve been working on something really cool behind the scenes that we’re finally ready to tell everyone about. One of our fellow local music companies, ReverbNation, has acquired Sound Around and will be moving quickly to launch the product to their more than 900,000 artists.

Steve and I are both super excited to be joining the ReverbNation team to work on providing mobile products that will continue to move the needle on acquiring new fans, and engaging existing ones on a deeper level. We’ve been heavily vested in creating useful technologies in the mobile space, and we have no doubt that these efforts will only be amplified as we move into our new roles working alongside an impressive and passionate team of individuals.

For everyone that had a hand in touching, shaping, or otherwise influencing our foray into building a product and launching our first company, we can’t thank you enough for all of the hours of mentoring, being a cheerleader, and (most importantly) bringing us down to size when we needed it.

Skype It Up: Hooked On Data [Infographic]

Ryan Van Etten — Sun, 30 May 2010 18:10:18 +0000

Call me crazy, but I was surprised to see that only 13% of international call minutes last year were on Skype. I thought that number would be higher—I think it will be within a few years because of the amplifying access to computers both at work and home. Then there’s mobile VoIP. Skype already has apps for iPhone/Blackberry/Android/Symbian, and it’s only a matter of time before the majority of cellphones are smartphones. The carriers will want us hooked on data—won’t they?

Graphic: Flickr/GDS Digital

Did you also notice the relatively small amount of Skype-to-Skype usage? That means most Skype minutes are actually paid. Personally, I’d really like to see 3-way calling with video in the future, which was announced as a possible upcoming paid feature, but I’d probably only actually use it if it were free. However if I could get by without paying AT&T I might rethink that. Skype isn’t the only mobile VoIP service either, and, according to Wired, mobile VoIP is beneficial to cellular carriers.

Emotional Attachment To Music

Ryan Van Etten — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 23:26:46 +0000

Terry McBride—CEO of Nettwerk—talks here about imagination. He argues that with music, context trumps content because music creates emotional bookmarks in our mind. Simply, the song is an emotion. These emotional bookmarks are significant because they enable us to travel backwards in our memories to when we experienced the music. Consumers are in control of the music industry, and access rules:

Excerpts From Terry McBride’s TEDxVancouver Talk

04:25: We hear a lot of discussion about “content is king.” Well we have to have content, granted, but content comes from your imaginations. But it’s the context that is now king. I mean think of what’s happened withinside the music business where over the last ten years, through litigation, through legislation, the business has tried to change the behavior of tens of millions of teenagers. When are we ever going to learn we cannot change the opinion of teenagers? We keep trying it generation after generation and you’d think that we would learn from history. You cannot litigate behavior and you cannot legislate behavior. What you can do is listen to it, and listen well, and understand behaviors. If the music business could accept the fact that a song is an emotion, then they’d understand that the monetization of that emotion is the business.

09:53: The iPod’s over. Apple knew that. They created something new—it’s called an iPhone. An iPhone is about behavior. It’s not about owning content. It’s about behavior. And then when they opened up that app store to allow everybody else to put their ideas in, that’s when it really took off. I mean eighteen months ago that business didn’t even exist, and now they’re doing 6.6 million downloads of applications a day. From zero. All they’ve done is crowdsourced the imagination of the world. So let’s crowdsource the imagination of that world to save the music business.

Human Brain Connections by ethanhein on flickr

Music Consumption in a 180°—Terry McBride Interviews.

Ryan Van Etten — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 20:50:41 +0000

The interviews below featuring Terry McBride—CEO of Nettwerk—offer terrific insight to the digital era of music. Terry points out that the ways in which we consume music are changing rapidly—largely due to smartphones—and that the “emotional glue” between fans and musicians is the essence of music business.

With the smartphones coming, and all these apps coming, the music business gets one more kick at the can, and I hope they don’t fight this one, because there’s a huge opportune to grow the business faster than what they’ve ever considered. I think there’s a huge sense of optimism for the first time in about five years that this business can actually grow. –Terry McBride in his 2009 interview with tech reporter Matt Hartley [video above].

Music is becoming more of a service than a product and Terry believes that in these digital times, context trumps content, access trumps ownership, and customer service is as important as ever. P2P filesharing should cease to be an issue as listeners increasingly prefer instant-access streams.

The second interview details the history of the Nettwerk Music Group as a DIY all-in-one company that developed by adapting to meet the needs of musicians and their fans. Towards the end he talks about joint ventures between musicians and non-music brands as being likely in the next five years.

I really think that the paradigm is shifting. I think within the next five years you’re going to have other brands inside the market signing artists. Brands will look at this going, well, we already use music within all of our TV, and radio, and, you know, internet media. Um, why don’t we just sign the artist? –Terry McBride, in his 2008 CMU-Tube interview [video below].

On my previous post, Musicians—Money Is Not Motivation, Dave MacDonald had commented that Terry McBride recently spoke positively about the music industry at TEDxVancouver in November 2009. That video isn’t available yet, but I hope they air it soon on TEDxTalks—I’ll keep you posted.

[homepage thumbnail photo: Flickr/stephen_dyrgas]