Next week I will be giving two talks at the National Conference on Student Recruitment, Marketing and Retention in Denver. The first is called “Going Mobile: An Introduction to the Mobile Web” where I will talk about the huge paradigm shift that is underway. To paraphrase Tomi Ahonen – “mobile is as different from the internet as tv is from radio.”
While updating this talk, I’ve gathered some fascinating stats which I would like to share:
- The average person checks their cell phone 150 times a day.
- 25% of homes in the U.S. have abandoned their landlines. (It’s 60% in Finland)
- There are 5.2 billion active mobile phone subscriptions in the world. 4.2 billion people actively use text messaging.
- 49% of all banking accounts in Kenya are mobile phone banking accounts. (In Sweden, the government is considering eliminating currency.)
- 42% of teens in the U.S. can send a text message without looking at their phone. (They can type faster on a phone than a QUERTY keyboard)
- In North America, we pay an average of $50.00 per month for mobile tel/com services. IN the emerging world, it’s about $5.00 per month.
- When U.S. teens were asked “What’s your favorite way to communicate?” They answered:
- Mobile Text: 67.53%
- Mobile Call/Voice: 9.22%
- Facebook: 8.84%
- Instant Message: 2.88%
- Email: 0.29%
The main takeaway from my talk will be that if you are not thinking about mobile, you should be. Mobile traffic to the websites I support has increased 265% in the last year and I fully expect this trend to continue.
If you are going to be in Denver next week, stop by and say hello. This will be my third time presenting at this conference and it’s always a great event.
Looking forward to meeting you at the event. Love the stats in this post. See you next week!
Great stats! You just convinced me to attend your session next week, can’t wait!
Hey Mark, I heard great things about your talk via Twitter. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend Noel-Levitz this year, is there a video of your presentation somewhere? Thanks in advance.
Brandon –
There is no video of my talk, but you can get the slides and related materials at http://www.markgr.com/ncsrmr11/
Splendid presentation. Future oriented, a call for action certainly for university and colleges to pay attention to rising mobile usage and to respond with mobile based solutions.
It is an exicting time in the field of internet.
Am close to rolling out a responsive website design for my employers entire internet presence (not just a microsite).
The timing for doing this has worked out just right. 2 years ago, it was difficult to predict the caabilities of devices, and everyone was putting their bets on the iPhone. Today designing for the iPhone alone is reactive not proactive. The design I has been working on for the last year extends to a broader range of devices and anticipates change. We recently tested on a new blackberry device, and it worked without needing any tweaks.
I just presented on this topic at a conference in Sydney on the topic.