Mobile Tech & Business Blog

Will you be in San Francisco this Wednesday, July 28th? Attend the Mobile Web & Marketing Workshop! Thanks to the Small Business Administration for hosting. Admission is free, but seating is limited. Sign up here.

In Inc. magazine yesterday, Mobile Web Up shared how SMBs can benefit from geolocation apps like Foursquare and Gowalla.

Most of all, evaluate how your active marketing through a geolocation service will propel business. “It's not about Foursquare or MyTown or whatever else is hot this week,” Maxwell says. “It's about what investment of a company's time, energy and resources will create the greatest value moving forward.”

Read "Get Your Business on the Geolocation Map"

Here's some news from the banking and credit union industry:

• Banks with mobile capture twice their normal share of customers switching banks - 16% vs the typical 8%
• Attrition is 12% lower for customers that use mobile banking
• 60% of younger consumers use mobile as a deciding factor when selecting a new bank

To quote Bob Hedges of Mercatus: “Making the business case for mobile banking is like making the business case for oxygen.” It really isn't an option anymore.

When setting up a website for your business, you have a lot of ground to cover. You need to include an eye-catching yet professional design, service and contact information, website security, easy updating ability, and more.

By squeezing all of these features into a site, many businesses sacrifice loading time. Ironically, this is one of the most important factors in customer interest!

Converting a website from something that will look good on the average laptop, to something that will display quickly and easily on the average phone, means paying attention to a thousand little details. Sometimes simple changes mean significant increases in sales.

Fandango gets up to 20% of its weekend ticket sales from mobile phones!

According to Fandango's CMO Ted Hong, on some weekends the company sees up to 20% of advance movie ticket sales come through mobile.

Source: OMMA Mobile Reflections: Now It Gets Serious

Will you be in Northern California next week? If so, you don't want to miss the annual San Francisco Small Business Week - a series of powerful educational workshops and networking events, geared to small and mid-sized businesses.

It's tricky. Technology can tremendously help your business: lowering costs through automation, and opening new channels for sales and service.

The flip side of that is obvious: the rapidly-changing edge of technology, well, rapidly changes. And that means something that works today may suddenly not work well tomorrow.

Now here's an interesting chart.

What's important here: Last month in the US market, web usage on Android handhelds actually exceeded that of the iPhone.

What's the best way to think about the iPad from a "use-it-on-the-go" perspective? Is it more like a laptop, which people generally only use if they are in a place they can sit down? Or is it more like a mobile phone, which is so small and light that people generally carry it wherever they go, and use it in situations that a "real" computer would be impractical (such as standing in line at the supermarket)?

We're giving a 90-minute live workshop called "Mobile Marketing and the Mobile Web" this week. It's in San Francisco, CA, at the Small Business Administration's Entrepreneur Center, this Wednesday, April 21, at 2:30pm. Details and signup information here. If you are not in the area or can't make it, our free newsletter subscribers will get access to the workshop notes afterwards - so sign up now.

Most websites don't work well in mobile. They are hard to read and use, and sometimes just don't work in mobile phones.

To solve this, you face a hurdle: most web designers don't have a clue when it comes to mobile. You have a business to run, and better things to do that become a technology expert. So how do you choose a design firm that is truly qualified?

Let me give you a new distinction. It's an important one that not many people are aware of yet.

Your company's website is a business asset. Its usefulness is limited by how many qualified visitors it gets. Especially for lead or sales generation, SEO - Search engine optimization - is a powerful way to encourage search engines to bring in your best clients.

In the past few years, there have been two main kinds of SEO. But very recently, a NEW form of SEO has emerged, that is very relevant to retail, restaurants, and any other company that benefits from local "foot traffic."

Mobile Web Up was featured in an article in Small Business Computing, titled Why You Need a Mobile Web Site.

When you have a web design firm prepare your website for mobile devices, there are a couple of decisions to make. One is how your website will handle something called "device detection". How important is this? Let me explain.

Here's some fascinating statistics about mobile-based web browsing in the USA, for the quarter that just ended:

• Two-thirds of people use either an iPhone, or an iPod touch.
• About fifteen percent use an Android-based phone.
• About ten percent use a Blackberry device.

(Source: Quantcast)

This is all GREAT news for you. Let me explain.

If your business has a website already, why bother upgrading it for mobile? What's the benefit of making sure your website can be read and used on the iPhone, Blackberry, and Android phones?

It's simple: To reach the outrageously growing crowd of consumers going online with mobile devices.

From The Economist magazine, Aug 13th 2009.

Ever greater numbers of Americans are disconnecting their home telephones, with momentous consequences.

Source: Cutting the cord: America loses its landlines

When adapting a website for mobile phones, not all devices are the same. Web designers are finally starting to distinguish between a visitor using a desktop or laptop web browser, and one who uses a handheld device. Now, however, it's time to make a new distinction: between smartphones and what are called "feature phones".