Stop asking when mobile will be the next big thing, it happened a year or two ago!

As I and others (see this great post by Reg Baker in 2011) have been pointing out, people have been saying mobile is the next big thing for over 15 years, even in the days when that meant SMS, or WAP, or writing 100s of apps for different types of phones. At conferences and client sessions I keep being asked “So, when will mobile be the big thing?” The answer is that it is now a big thing, and it has been for probably 18 months or more. There are lots of interesting aspects to why mobile is so important, its role in mobile ethnography, its role in audience measurement, its use in location based services, and the gloss that is the quantified self. But there are two massive areas that outweigh all others. The first is online and the second is CATI. I have been talking to a wide range of survey providers as part of the book on mobile market research I am writing with Navin Williams and Sue York (due out in September) and there is a consensus that about 20% to 30% of online surveys are being taken (or attempted) by people using mobile devices – […]