Geologists have long had a phrase (uniformitarianism)
that helps them understand what they are seeing in the rocks, and how today’s
geographical processes can be used to explain what happened millions (hundreds
of millions) of years ago.
Why am I talking about geology on a mobile blog? Well, there was an article on New Media Age
recently (Analyst
speak: An m-commerce Christmas is still a way off, despite the sector's health)
that didn’t believe that this would be an “mCommerce” Christmas, despite some
of the hype beginning to appear:
“our findings make us sceptical that this year will see the big
m-commerce push that we have been told to expect”
And yet, the author’s own research would seem to contradict
his conclusion. Having surveyed 3,000 people 20% had “engaged in m-commerce”
and “39% – are using their phones to shop or to help them shop at least once a
week”. The survey was asking about historical behaviour as well – “have you
done this in the past 12 months” type questions.
The same publication only a day later then published
research suggesting mobile-device originated search had doubled in the past
12 months (to 15% of all searches in the UK) and quoted the researchers as
saying:
“Growth in consumer confidence, combined with growth in people using
their mobile for searching for information and buying goods and services, means
that some retailers will “smash” records for m-commerce transactions this
Christmas”
The same article quoted Domino’s Pizza as having made
£10million through mobile sales this year alone, with mobile PPC becoming
increasingly important, and Forrester Research suggesting 31% of the UK
accessed the mobile internet at least once a month (12%age points higher than
the European average).Today’s NMA highlights Top Shop as having 8% of it’s
online sales coming through mobile already (Mobile
accounts for 8% of Topshop ecommerce sales).
So, how does this all tie up to geology? Well, Google have
stated that they have seen a five-fold increase in mobile search over the past
two years (Google
to Marketers: Get Better at Mobile) – akin to the growth rates seen in the
early days (late 1990s) of … the internet! So, what has happened before, could
easily be extrapolated to be about to happen again?!
All sorts of research and data is being published, almost
daily, that shows the inexorable rise of mobile internet access in the UK (e.g. ONS data suggests
that there are 6million more people accessing the mobile web this year than in
2010). A bit like the late 1990s, when business had to be ‘convinced’ that
having a website was a good idea.
And yet.. 70%
of websites still (!) don’t have a mobile-optimised version, of any
sort.
NB. We can help with that…
