Hispanics the Fastest-Growing Ethnic Group for Mobile

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According to a new study by Nielsen, Hispanics are quickly adopting mobile and outpacing all over ethnic groups. They are the fastest-growing ethnic group for mobile downloads of music and photos. Hispanics are also more likely to watch video on the their mobile phones than others, follow brands, have a blog, and have more than one social network.

Hispanics also use mobile more often, in general, than they average U.S. consumer. They make 40 percent more phone calls per day (13), and send and receive about 941 SMS text messages per month – more than any other ethnic group.

Naturally, this means lots of sharing power for Hispanics. They are also more likely than other U.S. consumers to share videos, articles, links and websites. That also means that Hispanics have a lot of spending power and a broad mobile audience ripe for marketers to cater to.

Nielsen says “mobile presents a significant avenue of opportunity for marketers looking to reach Hispanic consumers,” and the firm also notes that the group has “amassed significant buying power, despite perceptions to the contrary.” —TechCrunch

Delve into the reason behind this mobile engagement, and you’ll see something interesting. Hispanics are less likely to have an Internet connection at home than the average U.S. consumer. Only 62 percent of Hispanics have access to Internet at home, whereas the U.S. average is 76 percent.

If you’re building a mobile site for a segment that may be Hispanic, consider posting content in two languages, or make two mobile sites — one in English, one in Spanish. Remember to reach the braodest number of consumers for your clients on mobile — especially if they’re searching for local information on their phones.

To start building mobile websites quickly and easily for your clients, go to mojaba.com/signup to sign up for your FREE Mojaba account.

Mojaba to sponsor SOBCon May 4-6 in Chicago

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We’re pleased to announce that we are sponsors for this year’s SOBCon event in Chicago. Every year, SOBCon brings together some of the most well-known and respected voices in business and media for a weekend of learning and networking. We’re excited to connect with speakers like Chris Brogan, Laura Fitton, Gary W. Goldstein, Steve Farber and others, and to meet all of this year’s attendees! Here’s more about the event, from their Eventbrite page:

SOBCon Chicago 2012 is one of the best learning forums for small businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs in the US.

The theme this year is Creating and Leveraging Opportunity: Strategy and Execution. We’ll be discussing and applying qualitative and quantitative critical thinking. We’ll focus on the seven keys to strategy and execution: Mission & Vision, Position, Conditions, Decisions, Networks, and Systems. Each presentation, model, and mastermind session will change the way you see yourself and your business. The interactive sessions will keep you in the room.

Christian will be attending SOBCon from May 4-6, so if you’re going, be sure to stop by and see him. We’ve also built a stellar mobile site for the event, complete with speaker bios and location info, which you can see by visiting m.sobevent.com on your mobile device.

Learn more about SOBCon at sobevent.com, or follow them on Facebook or Twitter.

 

Pebble: E-Paper Watch for iPhone and Android Raises $5M, Becomes Most Successful Kickstarter Campaign Ever

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You may have seen the buzz this week about Pebble, a new watch that syncs with your smartphone to deliver messages, incoming calls, music control, weather alerts, Twitter notifications, cycling and running stats, and more straight to your wrist.

Experts are calling it the best smartwatch experience yet, which is, presumably, why it’s doing so well with crowdfunding. There are rumors that Pebble was rejected by VCs, so they turned to Kickstarter instead. Within 28 hours, they had raised $1 million. By Thursday morning, they topped $5 million — making Pebble the most successful Kickstarter campaign to date. Not only have they raised the money, but they’ve also generated demand for the watches and an eager community ready to develop apps and purchase the product when it’s released next fall.

Check out the Kickstarter video below, and visit Pebble’s Kickstarter page to learn more or donate to the project. And tell us what you think. Would you use this smartwatch?

Watch for Growth in Mobile Payments

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Mobile payments will overtake plastic payments by 2020, experts say.

Pew Internet & American Life Project released a new report Tuesday about the future of mobile payments, and the results look pretty exciting.

Experts say that within the next eight years, mobile payments may beat out credit card, cash and check payments, becoming a primary way we transfer money. In the study, 65 percent of experts surveyed by Pew agreed that by 2020, ”most people will have embraced and fully adopted the use of smart-device swiping for purchases they make, nearly eliminating the need for cash or credit cards.” The study cited factors like convenience and security being a major influence to that shift to mobile commerce.

However, 33 percent of experts disagreed, saying that NFC (the technology that makes  pay-swiping possible for smartphones), won’t be accepted yet. They said “People will not trust the use of near-field communications devices and there will not be major conversion of money to an all-digital-all-the-time format. By 2020, payments through the use of mobile devices will not have gained a lot of traction as a method for transactions.” So cash and credit will still be primary payment options in the next decade.

There were only two choices in this study, so it’s not clear how much the experts think there will be a crossover between mobile payments and traditional payments, but the fact that so many experts see mobile payments as a near-primary way to transfer money is significant.

And though this study is an interesting look at using NFC as a payment method, it doesn’t take into account other forms of mobile payments. Currently there are a number of existing mobile payment options — or “mobile wallets” as they’re sometimes called. The new Google Wallet is getting rave reviews and more users every day; PayPal, the mobile commerce giant from eBay is the accepted standard for mobile payments; and our neighbors and friends, Dwolla, are picking up press and momentum for their credit-card-less methods. There are also rumors of a digital wallet from Apple coming soon.

It will be interesting to see the adoption of mobile payments in the coming years. What do you think? Do you use mobile payments often? Would you trust your phone to be your sole money-transfer device?

Smartphones Quickly Approaching Saturation in the U.S.

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Smartphones are rapidly growing in the U.S. So much so that Nielsen reported that 50 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers use smartphones. comScore, on the other hand, reports that that shift will happen sometime this year.

Graph from Nielsen.

Regardless of the percentage of mobile subscribers on smartphones, the growth of the smartphone revolution clearly makes it the fastest growing device in history, as shown by the graph below, from asymco.com:

This graph from ASYMCO shows how rapidly mobile technology is being adopted by the masses.

If that point is crossed then it would mark the smartphone as one of the most rapidly adopted consumer technologies of all time. —

After 50 percent, there’s still some work to be done for full smartphone adoption. We’re predicting that after this, smartphones will not only be attractive for individual consumers, but also for entire households. Think back a few years when only the heads of households had cell phones. Then spouses got them, then grown children, then teenagers. Now even elementary school children have cell phones — and, increasingly, they’re expected to by parents, adults and peers.

We think the same will soon happen with smartphones. Now it’s not only a necessity for the adults in the family to have smartphones, but also the children — or, in some cases, more-so the children.

All of this raises the question: Will there be a time when a large segment of society will have only a smartphone and no laptop or desktop PC? It’s already happening around the world.   In the U.S., 25 percent of Internet users access the web solely from a mobile device. In Egypt, that number is 70 percent, and In India, 59 percent are mobile-only Internet users. We wouldn’t be surprised if sooner rather than later, the U.S. saw a surge in mobile-only Internet access, especially given the swift growth of smartphones.

 

Mojaba featured on Startup America Blog

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We’re thankful to have been included as a featured startup in the Startup America Blog this week. See the article below, or visit s.co to see the original post. And thanks to everyone at Startup America for all their hard work in supporting our country’s startups.

——————————————————————————

By Christian Gurney, Co-Founder of Torsion Mobile – Today’s Featured Startup America member. 

What inspired you to start your company?

By 2015 more people will access the web with a mobile device than a PC, but only 20% of websites are usable on a smartphone. Mobile technology offers immense business opportunity, particularly globally. More Africans have access to mobile phones than to clean drinking water, according to Nielsen research.

“This is the biggest technological shift in the history of man,” said Gurney to the Des Moines Register in March 2012. 

Tell us something unique about you and your co-founder(s)?

Both of us have non-traditional backgrounds for a tech startup. Christian studied Archaeology in college and lived with Bushman groups in the Kalahari Desert. Co-founder Richard Kirsner has studio art and business degree. And both of us have been in tech for decades.

Our age (48 and 65) is also a little unique relative to our peers, but in line with what the Kauffman Group has shown – most founders are older than people typically think. We like to say that we’ve already made a lot of mistakes in our careers and we’re unlikely to make the same ones again. The balance of our employees are a lot younger, but we have a great mix to understand emerging technology and our customers and still have experience and maturity in the leadership.

What problem does your product or service solve?

Our product, Mojaba, helps creative professionals build mobile web sites for their clients faster, with more device compatibility and at a more affordable price – all without needing to learn programming or web coding.

What are your startup’s three biggest challenges to growth?

Getting traction with a wider customer base, finding the right mix of marketing channels to reach prospects and securing capital to accelerate our growth.

How will Startup America help your startup grow?

By encouraging a community of startups both locally and nationally, we get to interact with other founders tackling the same problems. We’ve also used some of the services targeted to startups and that’s helped manage our expenses.


Co-Founders, Christian Gurney and Richard Kirsner with our (very pumped) CEO Scott Case at Startup City.

Check out their product: 

Torsion Mobile is excited to announce the release of our new product, Mojaba. Mojaba is an intuitive Software-as-a-Service tool that enables creative professionals to build beautiful and effective mobile websites for their clients. We’ve been hard at work for over a year getting the system ready, and we’re excited to present it to the public.

After following the mobile trends, we’re certain that 2012 will be a year with an intense focus on mobile — mobile searching, advertising, commerce and Internet browsing will be key players this year. We want to help creative agencies embrace this shift and bring their clients into the age of mobile. To do that, we’ll provide cutting-edge features and services exclusively to marketers, advertisers, web designers and other creative professionals.

Mojaba has a simple drag-and-drop interface that allows agencies to build mobile websites quickly and easily. With Mojaba, agencies can organize by client and build multiple website drafts. Mojaba features include video, image linking, click-to-call, click-to-email, and find nearest (and nearest open) locations. Every element in Mojaba is customizable, for complete design flexibility, and Mojaba’s back-end, geo-location analytics are faster and more powerful than location tracking from Google Analytics.

Mojaba’s agency-only focus is important. There’s plenty of competition selling mobile websites (and website builders) to the end user. So we want to go beyond. By working only with agencies, we can provide not only a platform to build mobile websites, but also a database of materials to help agencies sell mobile to their clients. We have services to help agencies get the most out of Mojaba — we’re constantly updating the system, and we take comments and suggestions from our agency partners very seriously. In future releases of Mojaba, we’ll continue to provide the best mobile solutions in the market as well as the tools that agencies need to make their clients successful on the mobile web.

We have a very talented team of developers and designers with a penchant for building new and innovative features. “If we can dream it, we can develop it,” as our chief technological officer says. Often, that leads to advances in a matter of weeks.

Mojaba is the first tool from Torsion Mobile, but we’re looking forward to developing it as a global tool and an open door to exciting mobile solutions in the years to come.

Learn more:
Region: Startup Iowa
Mojaba:  www.mojaba.com
Team: www.torsionmobile.com

Click to join over 6,000 (and growing) Startup America members:

What’s New in Mojaba 1.4: Web Fonts and Home Screen Icons

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We’re excited to bring you the next round of updates from the Mojaba front lines. Check out the new stuff we have in store for Mojaba 1.4:

Web fonts give you more typeface flexibility.

1. Web Fonts. Now you can preview hundreds of fonts from the Google Web Fonts library and select the ones to use in your mobile site.

Home Screen Icons let users bookmark a website straight to their phone's home screen.

2. Upload Home Screen Icon. Upload an image that users will see if they bookmark your client’s website to the home screen of their phone. You choose the image, we’ll format it to appear nicely on a user’s home screen. See our help system for best practices on choosing an appealing home screen icon.

3. Tweet for Help Button in appBuilder. Now you can send us a tweet for help straight from the Mojaba appBuilder. We’ll report back with a solution ASAP.

4. Updated Analytics. We’ve updated our analytics to be faster and easier to read. As always, we’re improving Mojaba to be faster and more powerful.

More Evidence: It’s Time to Go Mobile.

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Mobile web

Image from awdp.org.

In the Wall Street Journal this week, Ed Nash said it’s now imperative to have a mobile web presence. He says the Web 3.0 party is already in full swing, so those who aren’t on mobile better get their dancing shoes on — it’s time to go mobile.

“With half of the total U.S. population already accessing the Web through smart phones and tablets, a mobile platform is a necessity.” —Ed Nash

Nash also says that to engage in the web-based world, you must be “broadly accessible and elegantly intuitive” — and your involvement in mobile web needs to happen quickly. Nash says he has heard from several big companies that they’re looking to implement mobile by 2014. That’s too late.

Very soon, mobile will be the primary way we access the web — and, in some places, it’s the only way people access the web. In the U.S., 25 percent of users access the Web exclusively through mobile devices. In Egypt, that number is 70 percent.

Just more evidence that the shift to mobile is here — this is the tipping point, and businesses need to go mobile ASAP. Luckily, there are intuitive tools available to make that easy. If you have clients who are thinking about mobile, mock up a Mojaba site and show them what’s possible. It’s free, and you’ll get their business if you show them the benefits of going mobile.

Visit mojaba.com to sign up for your FREE account today.

How Mobile Phones Facilitate Money Flows [Video]

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In developing countries, cell phone adoption is closely linked to national wealth — and in Kenya, nearly 15 percent of the country’s GDP changes hands via mobile.

This video, created by Financial Times as part of its Graphic World project, discusses mobile economic trends across the developed and developing world — and how mobile is facilitating the flow of money and transforming the global economy. Check it out: