I started out in mobile computing way back in the '80s, so it has been fascinating to watch the mobile wave take place. The past year has been a watershed one for mobile as an industry at large, as America catches up to Europe by abandoning landlines altogether.
Mobile phones were adopted over years, but smart phones have been adopted in a much shorter time frame, mirroring adoption rates of television from the 1950s, which had an incredible cultural impact. It is expected that more than 5 billion smart phones will be in use by the end of the decade.
An extension of smart phone adoption is the surge in tablet usage, which is effectively the other side of the same coin. In October's webinar we talked about Kindle's effect on this market and how Amazon is using it to expand the tablet market and therefore their customer base.
A simple way to note the growth of mobile is by looking at the amount of traffic from social networks. In 2008 only 1% of Facebook traffic was from mobile devices. Today it is 30%. In the same period, Twitter traffic went from 25% to 50%.
The most important thing to note, however, is that this year 250 of the Fortune 1000 advertisers are using mobile campaigns. This is up from just a handful two years ago. Mobile is exploding and is expected to continue to do so, and we're just seeing the beginnings of the industry starting to consolidate.