Small Business Labs

The Economist and NY Times on Mobility

The Economist has a special section on mobility and the new nomadism.  The section is 14 pages long, and covers a wide range of topics related to cell phones and mobile computing and how they are impacting business and society.  Excellent coverage on how the new mobility is changing work locations and office environments.  Lots of discussions of working at "third places" like coffee shops, and the increase in working from home. 

If the Economist article is not enough reading for you, the NY Times Magazine has an 8 page article called Can the Cell Phone Help End Global Poverty.  Great quote on the growth of cell phones:

"...it took about 20 years for the first billion mobile phones to sell worldwide. The second billion sold in four years, and the third billion sold in two. Eighty percent of the world’s population now lives within range of a cellular network, which is double the level in 2000."

One of the major points of the article is cell phones are fundamentally changing the economies of many developing countries.  From the article:

"Today, there are more than 3.3 billion mobile-phone subscriptions worldwide, which means that there are at least three billion people who don’t own cellphones, the bulk of them to be found in Africa and Asia. Even the smallest improvements in efficiency, amplified across those additional three billion people, could reshape the global economy in ways that we are just beginning to understand."

The growing impact of mobility, cell phones and mobile computing are hard to overestimate.

Mobile Internet Links

Lots of recent mobile Internet, cell phone and mobile marketing news:

1.  Abileen Christian University is the first university in the nation to provide iPhones to incoming freshmen.  They say 93% of incoming students show up with their own PC, so the school is "choosing to take them to the next level by providing converged mobile devices."  Pretty cool. 

2.  Ad Age has a good overview of mobile marketing.  Their definition is straight forward:

"Mobile marketing is, well, marketing that makes use of the cellphone, and it could potentially take many forms."

They have U.S. mobile marketing spend growing to just under $3 billion in 2012. 

3.  ABI forecasts that Smartphone sales will increase at a "meteoric" pace.  From their press release:

"The market for smartphones will grow from around 10% of the total handset market in 2007 to 31% of the market in 2013."

4.   Instat forecasts that by the end of 2012 there will be close to 1  billion mobile Internet subscribers globally.  This is up from their estimate of 270 million in 2007. 

5.  Silicon Valley Insider has a nice post on the iPhone and mobile Internet usage called  Apple's iPhone Drives Huge Increase in Mobile Web, Video, Music Usage.  The bottom line - iPhone owners use the mobile Internet a lot.

6.  PSFK has a post on the boom in Internet accessible maps.  Key quote:

"The ubiquity of technologies such as GPS, mobile directional devices, interactive mapping tools and social networks is feeding a mapping boom..."

7.  Mashable has a post on MySpace's recent launch of their mobile Internet version. 

8.  TV Guide recently launched a mobile version of their website. 

Kleiner Perkins Bets on the iPhone

Kleiner Perkins is one of Silicon Valley's most successful and best known venture capital firms.  They've backed a number of well known tech companies including Google, Netscape, AOL and Amazon.  VC firms are referred to by grades in Silicon Valley, and Kleiner Perkins is at the top of the A list.

This makes their announcement of a $100 million fund that will invest in iPhone applications especially interesting.  Key quote from the press release on the focus of the fund:

"...a focus on areas including location based services, social networking, mCommerce, communication, and entertainment. The iFund will seek to fund entrepreneurs pursuing transformative ideas with the potential to become standalone, public companies."

Mobile computing, our consensus #1 technology trend for 2008, continues to gain momentum.

***Update - The New York Time has an article on this today.  It also covers Apple's iPhone developer's program***

Nokia Acquires Navteq - Location Based Services the Driver

Nolia announced they are acquiring digital map company NavTeq for $8.1 billion.  Here is Navteq's company descripton from their website:

"NAVTEQ digital map data offers accuracy, detail, reliability, and flexibility. Continuously updated to maintain its freshness and precision, NAVTEQ digital map data not only enables door-to-door routing throughout Europe and North America, it contains millions of Points of Interest (POIs), making it easy to locate everything from restaurants to hospitals and gas stations. You’ll find NAVTEQ data onboard most navigation-enabled vehicles produced in North America and Europe and on all the top Internet navigation sites."

Normally I wouldn't post on a big company acquiring another big company.  But the reason Nokia is spending a robust (and dilutive) 12x Navteq's revenues is the opportunity to participate more deeply in location based services.  Key quote on Nokia's acquisition reasons:

Nokia's President and Chief Executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said "location-based services are one of the cornerstones of Nokia's Internet services strategy. The acquisition of Navteq is another step toward Nokia becoming a leading player in this space."

Location based services are going to be increasingly important to small businesses (see our forecast report "The Connected World of Entrepreneurs" for more on this topic).  Nokia's acquisition of Navteq is another example of how important locaton based services have become.

MizPee and Location Based Services

MizPee is a location based service providing cell phone users with toilet location information.  Their website description is:

"MizPee finds the closest, cleanest toilet and gives you entertaining reading material once you get there. Since the service is cell phone-based, it's always with you, when you really need it."

The entertaining reading material appears to be text messages from other users.  This is yet another example of the rapidly growing number of location based services aimed at mobile phone users.

I saw this on Springwise, which is a really fun site with descriptions of lots of new businesses and new business ideas.

Yankee Group on Anywhere Consumers

The Yankee Group has a report (it is really a soft marketing piece for their services) describing their perspective on the Anywhere consumer, who are described in the report as:

"The Anywhere Consumer is Yankee Group's vision of an individual unfettered by the shackles of time and place, who connects to content, social and commercial interactions at any time from anywhere."

My favorite part is when they describe telcos, network operators and media conglomerates as "imperialists" who "asssume the consumer is not ready for, and does not want, freedom".  Consumers meanwhile are "throwing off the shackles of rigid, homogenous, totalitarian control of their daily activities".  I had no idea we are so fettered and shackled. 

The report has some nice charts and some interesting data about online behavior.  They have a similar piece on the anywhere network.

WiFi Proliferation and Mobile Computing

The market research firm Instat has released a new forecast report on WiFi chipset sales.  It is very bullish on the growth of WiFi with the key market segments being: (1) portable computing; (2) portable consumer electronics devices with Nintendo's DS and Sony's PSP (for those without kids, these are portable game machines) as examples; (3) WiFi enabled cell phones.

Instat says there will be 110 million WiFi equiped notebook PCs shipped in 2007, a 30+% growth rate over 2006.  They also expect WiFi equiped cellular phone sales to reach 27 million in 2007.  This is up from just 6 million in 2006, and Instat is predicting very rapid growth for WiFi enabled cell phones.

The platforms for mobile computing - powerful mobile computing devices and WiFi and cellular high speed wireless networks - are in place.  Prices are falling and networks speeds are improving.  Mobile location based services - navigation, mobile marketing, information retrieval  and even mobile dating applications - are becoming common.  People are increasingly seeing their cell phones and other mobile devices as their internet access method of choice. 

This shift from desktop access to mobile device access changes how people interact with the Internet.  It also requires businesses to rethink how they use the Internet to interact with customers, prospects and partners.

Philips Simplicity Concierge and The Local Web

Philips has been running an ad campaign for a service they call their "Simplicity Concierge".  The Philips Concierge service "culls information and recommendations" on local shopping, restaurants, etc. for 20 large, mostly US cities.  Their souces are a variety of local recommendation websites, and Philips consolidates the information on their website.  They also have a mobile version that delivers this information directly to cell phones.

This effort nicely illustrates several trends of importance to small businesses: (1) local recommendation sites are growing and gaining broader audiences and market power.  Being recommended and positively reviewed by these sites is becoming increasingly important for small businesses; and (2) mobile marketing via cell phones and other mobile computing devices is becoming more common, and impacting small businesses. 

We used to talk about how the Internet made location less important.  GPS systems, online maps, local recommendation systems, and mobile marketing are combining to drive a range of location-based services.  These new services are making the web both global and local, and creating new opportunities and risks for small businesses.  We discuss these trends in more detail in the 2nd installment of the Intuit/IFTF Small Business Forecast report series, which will be available in a couple of weeks.