Earlier this week I talked about Google Fiber in Kansas City, and this has me thinking more generally about internet access and how entrepreneurs interact with their customers online. It also ties in to Mindee's post from last week about entrepreneurs and their startups' websites.
Pew polling shows that home broadband and dial-up adoption appears to have reached a plateau:
Meanwhile, cell phone and tablet computer adoption is on the rise (and the cell phones are increasingly smart phones):
What I'm about to say next is targeted at people that are increasingly frustrated with dealing with websites and applications as they are "optimized" for mobile devices. Either you are frustrated with going through the hassle of doing so, or you are annoyed when those mobile pages serve as the main page for everyone else (I'm looking at you, Gawker.com). I count myself among both groups. We need to face the reality that smart phones and tablets are likely to play an increasing role how people routinely access the internet. A Pew survey finds that 17 percent of adults report accessing the internet mostly on their cell phones. Mary Meeker reports that mobile traffic is increasingly accounting for more and more of total web traffic--10 percent of the total now--with huge increases from just 3 years ago when it was just 1 percent of the total.
Have you considered the increasing amount of interaction you will have with customers solely through their mobile, touchscreen devices? Is your website optimized to have more touchscreen-friendly buttons and spacing? The numbers don't lie.
I think Google said it best, "Mobile is not a thing of the future. Mobile is a thing of right now." If you want to take your business or website to the next level, you HAVE to get mobile.
Posted by: Jeet Banerjee | September 05, 2012 at 01:50 AM