Mobile Applications and Communication

Mobile communication has been around for years, with Japan being the innovators with mobile technology, they were sending and receiving emails via their mobile phones in the 1990s.

Now with smartphones, and apps taking over the mobile market, there is more opportunity than ever to be able to access people when and wherever you want. According to www.mobithinking.com there are over 200 million mobile users of Facebook[1], as the need to be in constant contact with others to find out what you may be missing out on over takes current reality, this can be described as the “culture of availability”.

However, with technology becoming more and more advanced, Mintel[2] is now expecting the tablet devices such as the BlackBerry PlayBook, or Apple’s iPad, to become big competition for the smartphone market. One application that has really taken off recently is Skype, and by mid-2011 Skype will be offering Skype-to-Skype calls via 4G smartphones[3].

Is there now the chance for applications to specifically target consumers, with their previous downloading history? Can this be tracked, as a way of direct marketing to the users of smartphones?

The article by Stump, Gong and Li (2008)[4] examined the basic links between the adoption of mobile phones and age, education and income, however this was written in 2008, before the big uptake of smartphones, and so this is currently out-dated.

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[1] dotMobi., 2011. Global mobile statistics 2011: all quality mobile marketing research, mobile Web stats, subscribers, ad revenue, usage, trends... USA. Available from: http://mobithinking.com/mobile-marketing-tools/latest-mobile-stats [Accessed 18th February 2011].

[2] Mintel, 2011. Mobile Phones and Network Providers – UK, January 2011. London: Mintel International Group Ltd.

[3] Mintel, 2011. Mobile Phones and Network Providers – UK, January 2011. London: Mintel International Group Ltd.

[4] Stump, Gong and Zhan Li ,2008. Exploring the Digital Divide in Mobile-phone Adoption Levels across Countries, Journal of Macromarketing 28:397