Being connected is no longer enough, is it? Nowadays, more and more of us feel the need to be constantly connected.
Ninety-three percent of U.S. adults own a cell phone, and 17 percent of them now own a smartphone. That latter figure is up from 11 percent at the end of 2008.
And it's not going to stop there. The folks at Pew Internet and the American Life Project predict that the mobile device will be the world's primary connection tool to the Internet by 2020.
That guess might actually be on the conservative side. Rick Richardson — a CPA, technology futurist and CEO of Richardson Media and Technologies — believes “mobile Internet device shipments will grow 50 percent a year through 2012 to more than 500 million devices.” Gartner researchers take it a step further, saying smartphone sales will surpass PC sales by 2012.
Interestingly, mobile devices are becoming increasingly social in nature. According to the folks at Mashable:
- 30 percent of smartphone users access social networks through their mobile devices. That's up from 22.5 percent in 2009.
- Over the past year, the number of mobile subscribers who accessed their Facebook accounts on their mobile devices soared 112 percent. For Twitter, that number jumped by 347 percent.
“These figures are just from mobile browser statistics — they don’t even take into account the use of mobile applications for Twitter or Facebook,” writes Mashable's Christina Warren.
In short, mobile is a game-changer in how we connect and collaborate. Principled Innovation's Jeff De Cagna is convinced of it, and I'll take a closer look at Jeff's views in an upcoming post.
The question is, what does all of this mean for businesses — and, specifically, for CPAs?
That's where you come in.
The MACPA is closely following the mobile movement and the CPA profession's role in it, and we'd like to know how you are using your mobile devices.
Please consider taking a few minutes to complete this survey. Those who complete the entire survey will be entered into a drawing for a free MACPA webcast.
We'll feature results from the survey in a future post. In the meantime, thanks for your feedback!