Owning a mobile device has become a common thing in the current fast paced world. People use their mobile devices for everything from games, photo sharing to business. They are leveraging the power of mobile communication - and the prevalence of smartphone adoption - for almost anything.
Mobile devices and their technologies have reshaped businesses in many industries. A report conducted by AT&T and the Small Business & Entrepreneurship (SBE) Council, a nonprofit group that promotes entrepreneurship and small business, concluded that small business owners are having massive increase in revenue from implementing smartphones and tablets in their business activities.
Mobile technology is saving businesses lots of money and time. According to the survey. Smartphones are saving business owners billions of dollars and billions of hours of valuable time. Tablets and other types of mobile devices are also proving beneficial.
The survey also revealed that those business owners aren't working any less, but are using their time better increasing their productivity at a large scale.
Mobile devices are packed with faster and bigger processing power unit and larger memory. More and more apps are available for download at the mobile OS's dedicated marketplace. Apps can make a big difference, and for small businesses, there have been a report that three-fourth of them had increased productivity by having the ability to operate and do certain tasks remotely. Those businesses are estimated to save hundreds to thousands of dollars a year, by using mobile apps only.
Apps Boosting Productivity
The survey found that small businesses that are open on weekdays, can increase their productivity when their employees can use technology to aid their work. About 50 percent of small business owners with smartphones are conducting their business activities up to 7 days a week.
Apps are populating the marketplace and their numbers rises significantly. Mobile apps development is growing significantly fast that in fact, apps are currently obtainable not just for mobile phones but additionally for laptop computers, tablets to desktop computers. Despite businesses that offer mobile payment, the survey revealed that 77 percent of small businesses that use mobile apps, are using three or more apps, with GPS, mapping and navigation apps. According to the survey, 5 percent of them are using at least 20 apps to run their business. This include: remote document access, travel planning, banking and finance management, mobile CRM, cloud storage, and others.
Smartphones is Widespread
Smartphones can be found anywhere, and their price are decreasing while their specifications increase. Almost all small business owners are said to use smartphones to conduct business. However, other surveys suggest more advanced apps like mobile payments and push notifications are rarely used.
PCs and Notebooks are Additional
As technology is advancing, the gap between mobile device and traditional PC, and notebook, is shrinking. With cloud computing now widely spread, large memory and powerful processor, mobile devices are becoming more common in accessing data, like spreadsheet and Microsoft's documents. As business owners are becoming more mobile, their dependencies to their smartphones and tablets are increasing. While smartphones are still the most popular, 31 percent of small businesses reported they save at least 5 hours per week as a result of using PCs/notebooks.
The Evergrowing Data Rates and Use
The report found that nearly a third of small to medium sized companies have seen their use of mobile data increase at an exponential rat due to activities such as downloading and uploading data from their mobile devices. Improvements in operational efficiencies, time savings and an increase in employee productivity were also cited by small businesses as reasons for the rise in mobile technology usage.
The Advancing Application User Experiences
Early business apps captured data using character-based screens with rows of input fields in systems such as teller workstations in early core banking systems or in HR or retail apps. The addition of colors, drop-down lists, icons, and other features did little to advance application usability. As apps tended to reflect their data model rather than the user's process. Applications have reached the moment that their delivered experience falls from the high expectation set by apps.
To solve the problem, many businesses are trying to have better and richer graphical elements that feature embedded analytics, supports, offers, and other interactions. The focus is moving from data capture to business outcomes, extending application reach to a more diverse array of user roles.
Tablets, Apps and Smartphones Work Together
With the ability to synchronize data on-the-go, business owners are saving time and money. The survey indicates that tablets are saving small businesses to almost 800 million hours and $19 billion a year, with mobile apps coming close behind.
With these capabilities, businesses can have a paperless environment. Although most businesses have already adopted to a paperless work system, still many businesses struggle to manage heaps of documents and rely on the conventional document management systems. With the advent of mobile apps, a completely virtual file sharing and document management system is possible. With more dedicated apps designed for their purpose, business owners can do almost anything from their mobile devices, at any time, anywhere they want.
Conclusion
The communications revolution led by the rise of mobile devices and mobile apps is combining with cloud computing to reshape almost everything that matters today. Mobile devices with their technologies, and apps that can be found with ease, have helped many businesses, as well as the government and many other sectors, increasing their agility, flexibility, scalability and reliability.. Their use is increasing and more people are benefiting from it.
Connectivity that is abundance today is still shadowed by several threats, with the only major concern coming from privacy. Breaches of sensitive information may come from hackers, government surveillance programs to malware. Since drawbacks and risks are always there despite people are working hard to eliminate them, caution should always apply whenever a mobile device is connected to a network or the internet.