Dean Newton

Mobile Internet user to eclipse wireline users by 2015

It’s going to be a mobile Internet world and we’ll just live in it. That’s the conclusion of IDC, which is forecasting that mobile Internet users will grow by an annual compound rate of 16.6 percent through 2015, when they will pass PC and other wireline Internet users.

That’s not entirely surprising if you’ve been following along. Mary Meeker, the former Morgan Stanley Internet analyst and now Kleiner Perkins VC, forecast last year that the cross-over point would come around 2014. She said at the time that we were in the midst of a fifth computing cycle, following the mainframe computing eras of the 1950s and 60s, the mini-computers of the 1970s, the PCs of the 1980s, the desktop Internet era of the 1990s and now the mobile Internet age. Earlier this year, IDC noted that smartphone shipments in the fourth quarter last year topped 100 million units, pushing past PC sales.

IDC said the total number of Internet user will grow from 2 billion in 2010 to 2.7 billion in 2015, with 40 percent of the world’s population online. But as Internet penetration picks up, it will happen more on mobile devices than traditional PCs, something Apple founder Steve Jobs noted in dubbing this the post-PC era.  IDC said that as tablet use in particular picks up, it expects PC Internet usage to stagnate and then slowly decline.

http://gigaom.com/broadband/mobile-internet-user-to-eclipse-wireline-users-by-2015/

www.deannewton.com

Is your product development REALLY driving growth? Are you SURE?

Because new features add overhead to products (generally making them more complicated), a new feature has to provide so much benefit to customers that it’s worth incurring this overhead. There is no such thing as a “neutral” new feature. “The same” means worse.

When our product changes fail to actually improve business metrics—customer retention, usage, or sales, we should have the courage to admit it. In fact, failing to make the product better is an extremely powerful moment, one in which we have the opportunity to learn something important about ourselves and our customers. If we think a feature makes the product better but our customers disagree (not by what they say but by how they behave), then something about our mental model is flawed.

In one of the startups I founded, we had an extended period where we were really focused on the conversion rate of new customers into paying customers (it was a freemium business model). Our vanity metrics were looking good—up and to the right. The graphs even had the shape of the classic hockey stick. But cohort analysis revealed that something was wrong.

We divided our customers into cohorts, looking at the new customers who joined each day as a distinct group. Then we could ask, “How did today’s customers compare to yesterday’s?” And, much to our frustration, the conversion rates were almost exactly the same. It was easy to get conspiratorial. It felt like each group had set up a conference call with the previous group. “How many of you bought the product? One out of a hundred? OK, good, we’ll do that, too.”

The frustrating part was this pattern stayed constant for months, even though we were making the product “better” almost every day. The fact that customer behavior wasn’t changing revealed that we were wrong. We weren’t making the product better, we were making it worse.

The antidote to this problem is to stop using vanity metrics and start measuring progress more rigorously.

More here:  http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/11/are-you-building-the-right-product/

www.deannewton.com

Over a Third of US Adults Carry Smartphones

More than one-third of all U.S. adults have a smartphone, according to a survey published by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, one of the clearest snapshots yet of how smartphones are changing the U.S. mobile landscape.

The survey found that 89 percent of all U.S. adults have some kind of cell phone and that 42 percent of those are smartphone owners, which translates into 35 percent of all U.S. adults. Pew broke the survey results down by varying demographic groups, and found that Android devices are the most popular, and that smartphones are more popular among the affluent.

Read more: Pew study: 35% of U.S. adults own a smartphone - FierceWireless http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/pew-study-35-us-adults-own-smartphone/2011-07-11#ixzz1SJDZCXiB
Subscribe: http://www.fiercewireless.com/signup?sourceform=Viral-Tynt-FierceWireless-FierceWireless

www.deannewton.com

Amazing Android Growth in the EU / Overtaking iPhone

Android is now the top smartphone OS in six of eight key countries having edged past Nokia's Symbian in Spain, according to the latest quarterly sample data from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.

In the UK, Android's growth is being driven by non-smartphone owners upgrading, rather than people switching from other platforms. According to the research, 74.3% of new Android sales come from owners of "feature phones"; only 1.4% of new Android owners come from former iPhone owners.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jul/11/ios-android-blackberry-smartphone-data