Tag Archives: statistics

Lots of Smartphone Numbers

As much as one wants to try, much of the rhetoric around mobiles tdese days revolves around smartphones. While popular, smartphones are not the only computing interface that the world interacts with. So, its good to see where they sit as devices amongst some of the other computers we see these days.

In one set of numbers, our friend Tomi Ahonen looks at the largest computer makers when you include smartphones and tablets. Wild to me is that if you looked at these numbers a little less than half a decade ago, that you’d see just how many mobiles Nokia sold, which was crazy when I first saw it. Here’s a snippet of Tomi’s information:

Largest Computer Makers, incl. Smartphones & Tablets
Rank (was) Brand Units 2012 Market Share 2012
1 (1) Apple 272 M 22%
2 (2) Samsung 249 M 20%
3 (6) Lenovo 77 M 6%
4 (4) HP 59 M 5%
5 (-) Huawei 55 M 4%
6 (7) Dell 38 M 3%
7 (10) Sony 37 M 3%
8 (9) Acer 36 M 3%
9 (3) Nokia 35 M 3%
10 (-) ZTE 35 M 3%
  Others 331 M 27%
TOTAL 1,224 M

Read the rest of Ahonen’s Computing Summary at Communities Dominate Brands

Our other set of good friends over at MobiThinking have also put some numbers and an analysis together looking at how Samsung has been going about taking Nokia’s position as the major mobile player. Some really great pieces to take note of here, if for no other reason that you can map what Samsung is doing, to what Nokia and Motorola did before them and get a better idea of how mobile will evolve and where to look for the next shifts in mobile technologies:

…Analyzing the products available from the top five handset and smartphone manufacturers tells a very interesting story.
In the US alone, Samsung offers 153 different cell phones. Feature phone or smartphone? Cheap or expensive? Big or small? Flat-screen or physical QWERTY keyboard? 4G or 3G? NFC? Bluetooth? WiFi? Flip phone? Rugged phone? GPS? Whatever the customer wants, within reason, Samsung provides. It offers smartphones with a variety of operating systems (OS): Android, Windows, Bada (a home-grown OS) and there are plans to launch phones based on Tizen. The idea behind Tizen, supposedly, is to help Samsung reduce its reliance on Android…

Read the rest of Why Your Mobile Strategy Should Emulate Samsung’s at MobiThinking

Updated: Not long after this post published, we saw (via Twitter) that Vision Mobile has also published a suite of graphics which detail many of the statistics found in much of the mobile industry. What’s probably the best about this is that most of this data is shared on Flickr – where the licensing allows for inclusion into reports and other projects with correct attribution.

VisionMobile – Tablets nearly as important as smartphones as development targets

View the entire Flickr gallery from Vision Mobile

For more stats and resources towards mobile, bookmark our Case Studies and Research page; there’s always a lot of data, and at least on that page, you get some direction towards the pieces which should be near the top of your list.

Perspective of a World Getting Better

childhood mortality rates graphic by anil dash
A lot of times, you can look at the news and mounds of information that come from various sources and its just so pessemistic. I bet that to some degree that we are guilty of that here, MMM hasn’t always been the most chipper place. And yet there is some good news out there if you are looking for it. For example, take this series of data points shared by Anil Dash:

  • The percentage of people in the world living on less than $1.25 per day has been cut in half since 1990, ahead of the schedule of the Millennium Development Goals which hoped to reach this target by 2015.
  • The number of deaths to tuberculosis has been cut 40% in the past twenty years.
  • The consumption of ozone-depleting substances has been cut 85% globally in the last thirty years.
  • The percentage of urban dwellers living in slums globally has been cut from 46.2% to 32.7% in the last twenty years.

Read of the rest of The World is Getting Better at Anil Dash’s website… and pick up your perspective towards what’s really changing in the midst this powerful time of life.

[Slideshow] Disruption of Digital

Seems that more and more of mainstream media is seeing, acknowledging, and tracking the disruption of digital across web, mobile, and social networking. Business Insider has a slideshow on the topic:

The Disruption of Digital slideshow by Business Insider

Kind of lengthy, but worth taking a browse through. If you are looking at this outside the USA, what kinds of trends or items are you noticing?

Flurry’s Smartphone vs Tablet Perspectives

We are always careful here to post about stats looking at usages of smartphones vs tablets. Part of this is because of the entry point for much that information that can sometimes be skewed by access (for example, if you are a web service, then your stats only include those subscribing to your web service, not those who don’t subscribe to yours, or to one at all). That said, there’s always something to be gained from these notes, and Flurry’s latest leaves us a few things to consider.

Flurry Smartpones vs Tablets AgeBreaks resized 600

Flurry Smartpones vs Tablets Dayparting resized 600

Flurry Smartpones vs Tablets CategoryUsage resized 600

That’s all for the pictures, visit Flurry’s post, The Truth About Cats and Dogs: Smartphone vs Tablet Usage Differences on their blog.

Unique Numbers, Unique Possibilities

Useful assessment (Source: gsma.com) - click for full image

The image on this post comes via Horace Dediu (‏@asymco) via Twitter/TwitPic. It speaks to both the unique numbers that have characterized mobile for sometime in terms of its relationship of subscribers to the global population and to what’s addressable within those constraints.

In a previous post, we threw some numbers against the wall to explain in a similar fashion that while mobile is indeed an opportunity, what it can address directly isn’t limitless. Look at that graphic – as of 2012, the GSMA is saying that of the 4.7 billion people who could be addressable with mobile, 1.5 million (a tick less than 33%) of them are not connected due to network coverage issues. That’s a pretty large pocket of folks that you can’t rely on to download your app, receive your SMS/MMS, or scan your QR code/AR dimensional plane. For mobile to have effectiveness there, you’ve got to think more off the grid, and more to the point if mobile is the most relevant delivery or translation mechanism (for example, what we saw with AirStash on an airplane).

When you do adjust for that, then the possibilities of using mobile become unique enough that it seems as if it truly will reach the ends of the earth.

Digital & Mobile Leads to A Personalized Faith You Might Not Be Serving

One of the questions that comes across the brow, just about every month, asks how religious groups, missionaries, non-profits, or some other faith-serving group can adjust to the rise of mobile and social (aka, digital) services and devices. For the most part, many of the folks asking have been on the side of a paradigm of living and sharing faith much like a producer or broadcaster does – authority/validity on one end, action/activity on the other. Problem is, access to the content, whether it comes from verified sources or not, leads people to synthesize faith in a manner that works for them best, not necessarily for everyone. Disruptive to the norm? You bet.

Take a look at some recent statistics on device ownership from Pew Internet:

Pew Internet and American Life infographic on Gadget Ownership in the USA

Microsoft Excel-compatible spreadsheet of Gadget Ownership Data; More info about Device Ownership from Pew Internet

The majority of people own devices with a personal screen. Shared screens are owned a bit less. What should be the implications of this? We should be seeing much more personalization in mixed-media content for the devices with greater ownership. But, what do we see instead, the greater variety of content pushed to the higher economic of ownership (folks got to make a buck), with automation and personalization seen as longer-term functions of those offerings.

What mean is that you have more people with mobile devices, but you spend more time and money making your desktop-friendly website and HD video streams than you do providing content that sits on mobile screens that’s easier to share, comment on, and study.

Does that make sense? 

Of course it doesn’t. But that’s because low-cost and multi-channel digital access has disrupted the model for disseminating the faith that seems like it has always been hierarchical. But the faith isn’t such, it was and always will be organic first (“…he who does the will of the Father, the same is my brother…”) and then as the needs arise/fall, people take position to serve and direct (“…body is made of many parts…”).

The challenge for religion is to get out of its mindset that it controls the conversation and the process of faith. Digital has disrupted the mess out of the control that was never supposed to be permanent. If you want to adjust to the mobile paradigm, or the social networking paradigm, or the upcoming ones (AR, cybernetics, etc.), then you have to disrupt yourself, and find a faith that’s deeper than traditions, and more unified than maintaining an attention span.

Mobile Ministry Discussion Question

As you might have seen via Twitter and a few former postings, Cybermissions has begun the next Mobile Minsitry Training Course, and for the first week, I’m the guest presenter/faciltator. One of the questions that started off the discussion I thought was quite appropriate and so I’m posting both the question and my answer here to continue the discussion in a wider frame:

What really zings you about Mobile Ministry – the numbers, the opportunity, the ideas, the technology?

And here’s the answer as posted to the thread (w/addition of links or emphasis here)

I find that numbers are one of the more interesting parts of the discussion. Mainly because while we are very often in the mindset that the entire world (all 7 billion or so of us) is a candidate for evangelism, that we don’t usually pay as much attention to the numbers of people who are already hearing the message, who heard and rejected the message, or who are out of range of any [computer-aided] technological opportunity for the message of the Gospel. And if that sounds like I’m saying that not everyone can be reached with the Gospel via mobile, that’s pretty much it. The numbers don’t line up with the zealousness of the activity.

The numbers (for mobile ministry) do line up with the ability to fix some broken walls between classes/cultures as it relates to the Faith. The numbers do line up with the economic opportunity to improve situations for those using the devices (and by counterpoint, undermine the economic opportunity for those on the side of making the devices and pulling the materials needed for those devices). As it stands with current activity, mobile ministry is only addressing the side of people exposed to a literal message of the Gospel, its not addressing the lifestyle of those folks who should be influenced by a Holy Sprit-infused perspective.

If we look at it by the numbers, then the direct opportunity for mobile ministry gets clouded:
- global population of 7 billion
- global population of ~4 billion with exposure to some cellular mobile device/service
- global population of ~2.5 billion whom are some iteration of a professed Christian

If we take the first two (global population and all those w/some mobile exposure) as a proportion (2/3 of the world connected mobile) and do so in isolation (that is, we aren’t counting the other media channels like radio, TV, Internet; nor are we accounting for a global illiteracy rate of 60%), the we can take that 2.5 billion and ask a simple question:

Are 800 million people enough to spread the Gospel via mobile technology? Or, are 800 million people preaching a Gospel to themselves, missing the ears other 6.2 billion?

That’s where my answer to the question ends. What’s your input on this (I’ll point the class here to also view perspectives as well).

And just think, this is the first week of the Mobile Minsitry Training Course. There are three weeks left, and the conversations get a lot more intense than this. You should consider signing up the next time this class comes around.

Can Data Expose the Depths of Mobile/Digital Faith Efforts?

screenshot of email image from YouVersion showing Top 10 Bookmarked verses from their service

About a week ago, I received an email from YouVersion noting the top 10 bookmarked verses within their application. This is quite valuable information, especially if you are apt to advise people to use their digital tools in order to engage the Scriptures. Now, the fun comes in taking this kind of information and trying to make some sense of it. Upon receiving this, I tweeted an honest and business intelligence -like question:

Top 10 bookmarked verses in @youversion; the needs of digital believers can be summarized in these perhaps?

Why these verses? What about these verses speaks to the needs, or at the very least the attention spans mentally, spiritually, and socially to believers? Does this point to how mobile has fostered spiritual transformations (transformations)? Let’s see.

(1, 5, 6) Philippians 4:6-7, 13

Do not be anxious about anything. Instead, in every situation, through prayer and petition with thanksgiving, tell your requests to God. And the peace of God that surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus… I am able to do all things through the one who strengthens me.

Anxiousness tempered with prayer and thanksgiving. Not exactly the instant nature of mobile. One could argue that this is intentional friction to life if considered on this frame.

(2, 7) Proverbs 3:5-6

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own understanding. Acknowledge him in all your ways, and he will make your paths straight.

Having moved to prepaid instead of post-paid, I am seeing my trust stretched (amazing what a buffer missing doesn’t do in terms of keeping you off track).

(3) Jeremiah 29:11

‘…For I know what I have planned for you.’ says the Lord. ‘I have plans to prosper you, not to harm you. I have plans to give you a future filled with hope.’

Do we know what Facebook, Amazon, Apple, etc. have planned for our uses of their devices and services? Probably not. But we do have a sense of God’s leaning towards us.

(4) Romans 12:2

Do not be confirmed to this present world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may test and approve what’s the will of God – what is good, and well-pleasing, and perfect.

Well, it might be a bit late for this. There are more people who use mobiles (+4 billion) than who are Christians (~2.5 billion). What isn’t too late to happen though is a pattern of behavior that is distinct in it’s goodness, appeal, and viscosity while mobile and connected. I would argue that this verse isn’t taught in this way (again, a mobile filter here). But, if it were, what would Christ-thru-mobile look like?

(8) Romans 8:28

And we know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.

This is not something people feel when their favorite platforms and devices are no longer supported. But, again, it is a state of mind and affairs of the believer. Accessing this verse on a mobile is probably in context of knowing that some moment isn’t, but that the word (and device) is timely in its encouragement.

(9) Matthew 6:33

But above all pursue his kingdom and righteousness, and all these things will be given unto you as well.

The structure of this verse lends itself to having to read all of the context before it. It’s not that you get anything, but only those things that are necessary for life and godliness. I hope it’s taken in that context by those bookmarking it, because if you are leaning on this to get that next mobile, you might be following the leanings of the wrong god.

(10) 1 Corinthians 13:4

Love is patient, love is kind, it is not envious. Love does not brag, it is not puffed up.

Man. This is the kind of verse that makes all of those customized cases, skins, themes, and ringtones feel a bit worse for wear doesn’t it? Does our use of mobile demonstrate the kind of love being detailed in this section of Scripture? Or, is this marketer a reminder for the kind of love that needs to resonate through each service and application on these devices we use?

Interpreting the Data We Can See
Can the life of the digital believer on YouVersion be identified as Christ-following if we use just this snapshot? Clearly they walk through some of the more accessible passages in the text. There is also some kind of leaning towards the spiritual, emotional, and psychological health of the reader. We don’t know how often these are referenced, nor how often they are bookmarked.

To the the dismay of some, there isn’t one evangelical verse in here. To some, there is an almost hotel bible approach (NT, Psalms, and Proverbs) – so where are the minor prophets or even the Pentatuch?

If you teach the word, do you lean on these and other popular Scriptures as memory devices for the hope and help of the believers you are serving? Or, has this simple statistic from one of many applications that have been used on mobile devices shown the lack of a solid, secure, instructional view of the entire Bible (66 or 80 books)?

What Other Data Is There Worth Mining for Value
It is very true that just collecting and trying to interpret data for the sake of doing so is a fool’s errand. There’s a lot of knowlledge that can be gained, but very little understanding if it has no context. Something that I wondered in looking just at this snippet of data that YouVersion shared was what other kinds of information could they offer? For example, if there’s a top bookmarked verses, there’s also a least (where least is greater than 0 or null). There’s some kind of data wrapped around frequency of verses during times of the year? And possibly there is some regional variation towards which parts of the Scriptures are more tuned in towards than others. In a very simple sense of things, YouVersion and other similar service providers, sit on a bounty of information that’s just waiting for the right questions to be asked of it.

Would YouVersion, Logos, Accordance, Olive Tree, and others be open to these kinds of questions towards how people are using their applications? Shoot, it would just be interesting to compare the top bookmarked verses in each of these service-app platforms just to see how they are used differently. Would pastors/teachers be apt to know how to ask for this information (“hey, I know that these people following me in your app-service attend my church, is there any way to get a custom report towards how we all do in terms of general reading and searching data?” is the kind of question that I’m leaning towards. For those who use the group settings, this kind of information can be a boon.

What if we find out something that turns us off? Like people don’t read their Bibles but once a month in these apps. That many people are more apt to remember the app when their devices say to update, rather when they are admonished by their community to meditate on a specific passage (Joshua 1:8)? What could we do with the information then? Does mobile expose digital faith as helpful, a hindrance, or as just another Hebron between us and God?

That Ever-Evasive Calculation of Mobile ROI

Mobile ROI

Caught this on the 271st Carnival of the Mobilists (hosted by MobiThinking) and thought it just great to put into the stream of posts given the direction the past two have taken:

Many execs put items on their roadmap that their gut tells them are important, but it’s difficult to calculate the ROI.

While I agree that it’s impossible to calculate the exact ROI of soft ROI initiatives, I think you can calculate the ROI enough to objectively assess your priorities.

In fact, I think it’s critical that you do so. The mobile landscape is littered with too much wasted money because of executive gut decisions that didn’t end up the way they expected.

So, let’s walk through an example…

Read the rest of Mobile Roadmap: Calculating Hard ROI on Soft ROI Initiatives at Mobile Manifesto

In other words, it can be hard as counting black beans in the dark but its not impossible. A lot of how you determine that ROI starts from what you know and don’t know. Perhaps in light of the piece at Mobile Manifesto, these posts will help make your ROI calculation, and project viability measures, a bit easier to understand and work through: