1. Hyperlocal location services and the connected car are driving disruption.
2. Developers need to take more control of the mapping experience within their apps to create differentiation and promote their brands.
3. Understanding the usage context as well as proximity will differentiate location-based applications.
4. Current and future contextual capabilities will be another key differentiator.
5. Flexible, comprehensive LBS platforms are providing new alternatives.
6. Open-source maps and software are challenging the dominance of traditional map content vendors.

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Hardware and software vendors are doing their best to redefine the tablet as a more productive device for content creation. Device manufacturers are experimenting with new form factors, expansion ports, and data input methods. Traditional software vendors such as Microsoft have extended productivity apps to mobile operating systems, and are now competing with a number of mobile-only and mobile-first competitors.

The tablet is a hybrid device occupying the space between laptop and smartphone, but within that narrow gap it has the potential to outperform its competition. The most successful use cases for tablets involve mobility and collaboration, from purpose-built collaboration applications to vertically integrated application environments to role-based application suites that provide broad coverage for a specific employee. Rather than force tablets to fit an existing horizontal use case, businesses should look for targeted applications such as these to extend their journey into mobility.

Key highlights from this report include:

• Tablets will never be primary content creation devices, but have the potential to offer supplementary collaborative experiences that can surpass those of a smartphone or laptop.
• The lack of strong input will continue to hamper adoption of tablets until vendors can establish a clear value propositions for mainstream enterprises.
• Collaboration (both online and in-person) is the tablet’s killer app.
• Retail and health care are the industries making the most productive use of tablets, and Asia is an exciting center of innovation in enterprise mobility. Businesses should look to these industries and regions for inspiration.
• IT should not be afraid to look past the traditional iPad form factor to meet specific use cases.

The post Mobile Productivity: moving beyond email with collaboration appeared first on Gigaom.

Key findings from this forecast include:

• Globally, tablet shipments were expected to grow 50 percent in 2013. Shipments of tablets worldwide will grow at a 29 percent  rate compounded annually (CAGR) from 179 million in 2013 to 427 million by 2017.
• Tablet shipments are overtaking PC sales and global tablet sales will exceed those of PCs in 2015.
• At 64 million units as of 2013, the U.S. remains the single largest regional market. It will continue at a healthy pace, growing at a 25 percent CAGR to over 140 million units in 2017.
• China and emerging Asian markets will be the growth leaders. Chinese shipments will grow at a 43 percent CAGR. The rest of Asia will grow at a rate of 39 percent.
• Android is overtaking iOS while Windows struggles and Blackberry has all but disappeared. Android-based tablets accounted for more than half of shipments in 2013.

This report is a companion to our forecasts of mobile handsets and subscribers and of mobile operating systems and broadband.

Thumbnail image courtesy of shironosov/Thinkstock.

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The productivity gains that are uniquely enabled by the cloud and mobile also present significant security challenges. Valuable and private data stored on mobile devices presents potential nightmare scenarios for departments and teams using the technology as well as CIOs, CSOs, and IT managers, particularly on employee-owned devices that are out of their control. The growing trend of a more distributed and independent workforce is further weakening IT’s control of data behind the firewall. If not managed correctly, these challenges can lead to a reduction in productivity or unnecessary risk taking.

This research report will outline for IT managers the importance of balancing the advantages and risk of increasing enterprise mobility and will explain the following:

• To be successful, enterprises need to provide employees and partners with solutions that are simple, intuitive, functional, and fast.
• As infrastructure moves to the cloud, IT departments need to refocus on balancing the tasks of protecting company data while driving efficiency through new technology and services.
• Collaborating with and co-opting users into risk-management practices will lead to operational efficiencies, competitive advantages, and lowered risk.
• The increased mobility of the global workforce is contributing to the demand for cloud infrastructure. As this technology is implemented, users are demanding mobile access to documents locked behind the firewall.
• The mobility of data facilitated by new technology is a challenge IT managers will need to closely manage.

The post The rewards and risks of enterprise mobility appeared first on Gigaom.

Unless it does something dramatic with its product pricing, Apple will not have much influence on the next billion smartphone users. Despite its much-documented fragmentation issues, Google’s Android is the operating system (OS) to beat as smartphones move into the 4G era.

Key findings from this mobile operating systems forecast include:

• With its global dominance, Android will see its share of shipments increase in 2013 to 72 percent. It will lose a little share after that but not to Apple. We forecast Android will have a 64-percent share of global shipments in 2017, at which point Apple’s share will have declined to 11 percent from 20 percent in 2012.

• Despite some loss of shares by the two leaders, we’re forecasting a very conservative shakeout. Linux-based operating systems will contend with Samsung’s Tizen and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile for market share in different regions, but none will emerge with double-digit shares worldwide in the five-year horizon.

• The U.S. is the leader in 4G adoption, with 17-percent penetration in 2012 growing to 68 percent in 2017. Western Europe is a laggard in LTE, and spectrum fragmentation that limits roaming capabilities will continue to hamper growth. Still, 4G penetration will cross the 40-percent mark by 2016.

• China Mobile’s commitment to homegrown 3G and 4G technology has limited broadband growth, but China’s 2012 4G penetration will only reach 18 percent by 2017. Japan, which has the highest current 3G-penetration rate (86 percent), is not migrating to 4G as fast as the U.S. or South Korea due to lower operator subsidies. However, beginning in 2014-2015, Japan will cross over to 4G rapidly.

This report is built off the core global mobile subscribers and handsets forecast model.

The post Forecast: Global mobile operating systems and broadband, 2012–2017 appeared first on Gigaom.

Unless it does something dramatic with its product pricing, Apple will not have much influence on the next billion smartphone users. Despite its much-documented fragmentation issues, Google’s Android is the operating system (OS) to beat as smartphones move into the 4G era.

Key findings from this mobile operating systems forecast include:

• With its global dominance, Android will see its share of shipments increase in 2013 to 72 percent. It will lose a little share after that but not to Apple. We forecast Android will have a 64-percent share of global shipments in 2017, at which point Apple’s share will have declined to 11 percent from 20 percent in 2012.
• Despite some loss of shares by the two leaders, we’re forecasting a very conservative shakeout. Linux-based operating systems will contend with Samsung’s Tizen and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile for market share in different regions, but none will emerge with double-digit shares worldwide in the five-year horizon.

This report is built off the core global mobile subscribers and handsets forecast model.

The post Forecast: Global mobile operating systems, 2012-2017 appeared first on Gigaom.

Smartphone adoption worldwide is creating more and more demand for mobile bandwidth, but it won’t be a mobile broadband-majority world until 2016. While 75 percent of global smartphone subscriptions used only 2G connections in 2012, that figure will decline to 28 percent by 2017. By then, 3G will make up 55 percent of smartphone subscriptions and 4G 18 percent.

• The U.S. is the leader in 4G adoption, with 17-percent penetration in 2012 growing to 68 percent in 2017. Western Europe is a laggard in LTE, and spectrum fragmentation that limits roaming capabilities will continue to hamper growth. Still, 4G penetration will cross the 40-percent mark by 2016.
• China Mobile’s commitment to homegrown 3G and 4G technology has limited broadband growth, but China’s 2012 4G penetration will only reach 18 percent by 2017. Japan, which has the highest current 3G-penetration rate (86 percent), is not migrating to 4G as fast as the U.S. or South Korea due to lower operator subsidies. However, beginning in 2014-2015, Japan will cross over to 4G rapidly.

This report is built off the core global mobile subscribers and handsets forecast model.

Source: flickr user Alan Levine

The post Forecast: Global mobile broadband, 2012-2017 appeared first on Gigaom.

Key findings from the forecast include:

• Global shipments of all handsets will grow 15 percent in 2013, to 1.9 billion, and at an annual rate of 8.7 percent through 2017. In contrast, shipments of smartphones will grow 40 percent in 2013 to over 975 million, and grow at a rate of over 20 percent compounded annually through 2017.
• Replacement phones are the norm. Just under 15 percent of handset shipments went to new subscribers in 2012, and that figure will decline to under 5 percent by 2017.
• Smartphone shipments will grow at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24 percent in China, 26 percent in other Asian countries (including India but excluding Japan), and 37 percent in rest of the world (e.g., Latin America and emerging markets).

• In the U.S., where smartphones already make up 63 percent of shipments (growing to 76 percent in 2017), growth will be more modest. Smartphone shipments will increase 5 percent in 2013 to 160 million, then continue at a CAGR of 5.5 percent through 2017.

The post Forecast: Global mobile subscribers and handsets, 2012-2017 appeared first on Gigaom.

We define ”proximity-based social networking applications” as those that use geo-proximity as the
primary filter in determining who is discoverable on the social network. This differs from location-based  social networks such as Foursquare, which simply broadcast a user’s location to existing friends. By enabling users to meet new people and interact with them and their locally relevant content, proximitybased social networking applications are far more engaging. This experience will drive user adoption, and it presents multiple opportunities for advertisers to interact with potential clients in innovative ways. Brands that can interject themselves into the experience will see valuable returns.

The rise of proximity-based social networking also lays the groundwork for long-term disruption in the mobile landscape. Any movement toward social interaction through proximity networks will drive content to the edge of networks that will be consumed by users through ad-hoc peer-to-peer local area wireless networks. This shift from wide area wireless networking to local area networking will mitigate the data burden on carrier networks while reducing their influence. In turn, this will create opportunities for new players and innovative initiatives by mobile operators.

In the future, proximity social networks will manage and define the social and technical processes that dictate connectivity and interaction among mobile users in the same location. Discoverability and privacy are at the core of these protocols, and vendors are approaching these mechanisms differently. Getting it right will be paramount to determining which vendors survive and which fail. Vendors must overcome some difficulties in order to attract a critical mass of users to create a compelling experience.

Facebook has won the first stage of the social networking market evolution, but it may miss the rise of the proximity network due to its focus on controlling identity.

The post Proximity-based mobile social networking: outlook and analysis appeared first on Gigaom.

Many players participate in the mobile-messaging market, including carriers, handset original equipment manufacturers (OEM), platform vendors, social media players, stand-alone IP-based messaging services, aggregators, and SMS wholesalers. Each player competes in at least one of the primary areas of the messaging value chain: user interface, message delivery, and directory management.

The flexibility and extensibility of IP technology enables compelling and innovative user interfaces for mobile-messaging services. The use of application programming interfaces (APIs) has allowed IP-based messaging providers to synchronize their user directories with contacts within a user’s embedded address book, simplifying the interface and driving use. Carrier control of the mobile network and the ability to push messages to any phone across any network ensures that carriers will remain the key players in the delivery segment of the value chain.

While OTT players have experienced significant user adoption, their reach is still limited to smartphones and current subscribers. The carriers’ influence over the universally used phone number and its function as the foundation of interconnectivity has helped them retain an extremely influential position in the directory-management segment of the value chain. Regardless of carrier influence, however, the emergence of virtual phone numbers presents opportunities for IP-based messaging players to compete and cooperate with carriers in the mobile-messaging ecosystem, adding interoperability to their services. This trend will redefine the concept of OTT messaging, as the convergence of SMS and IP messaging is routing messages through carrier infrastructure as well as over the top. This convergence also allows market players to leverage one another’s strengths in the value chain, with carriers providing scalability and delivery while IP-based messaging apps develop compelling and innovative interfaces.

The ability of mobile messaging to support mobile marketers and enable consumers and the enterprise to communicate in real time when voice is not the best option will continue driving demand for mobile messaging. Consequently, we forecast there will be 27.7 trillion messages by 2016. We expect most of the growth in messaging traffic will come from IP-based messaging services, which will account for 60 percent of messaging traffic.

Mobile-messaging trends vary across the globe, so some markets are responding more effectively to the changing environment than others. In the United States, carriers are reducing the cost of SMS while aligning their business models with their expenses. Other carriers are partnering with OTT players or offering free IP-based messaging services of their own. Carriers that are ill-prepared to benefit from this inevitable shift to IP-based messaging will unwisely cling to the ways of the past and become less competitive. Successful carriers will embrace the new technology and use it to extend the value they are best-positioned to provide: reliability and scalability.

The post The converged-mobile-messaging market: analysis and forecast appeared first on Gigaom.