The Benefits of Mobile Device Deployment

A growing number of small and midsize businesses are finding high-value ways to deploy mobile devices – well beyond phone, voicemail, and Web access. Nine out of ten SMB (Small Medium Bussines) companies enable employees to check email via mobile devices and 64% use mobile devices for remote computing. More than half of SMBs allow employees to access applications and business data via mobile devices. With the hiring of so-called Gen-Y workers, organizations of all sizes can expect to see an exponential increase in the amount of textmessaging, which today is occurring in just two-infive small and midsize companies. Interestingly, texting does not represent a dramatic change in mobile usage, though it may result in fewer calls and fewer emails and thus require further refinements to carrier contracts. Serious text-messaging (and email-capable) devices, such as the RIM Blackberry and T-Mobile Sidekick, do tend to add a cost premium above basic cell phones; however, the added functionality can lead to higher satisfaction – particularly for Gen Y workers who most likely already own such devices. While we're still in the early years of mobile technology deployments, smaller companies are finding that sheer “mobility “ remains the key advantage – rather than more traditional goals such as increased sales or revenue. In fact, only one in four SMBs report that mobile technologies help them boost sales and revenue.

A growing number of small and midsize businesses are finding high-value ways to deploy mobile devices – well beyond phone, voicemail, and Web access. Nine out of ten SMB companies enable employees to check email via mobile devices and 64% use mobile devices for remote computing. More than half of SMBs allow employees to access applications and business data via mobile devices. With the hiring of so-called Gen-Y workers, organizations of all sizes can expect to see an exponential increase in the amount of textmessaging, which today is occurring in just two-infive small and midsize companies. Interestingly, texting does not represent a dramatic change in mobile usage, though it may result in fewer calls and fewer emails and thus require further refinements to carrier contracts. Serious text-messaging (and email-capable) devices, such as the RIM Blackberry and T-Mobile Sidekick, do tend to add a cost premium above basic cell phones; however, the added functionality can lead to higher satisfaction – particularly for Gen Y workers who most likely already own such devices. While we're still in the early years of mobile technology deployments, smaller companies are finding that sheer “mobility “ remains the key advantage – rather than more traditional goals such as increased sales or revenue. In fact, only one in four SMBs report that mobile technologies help them boost sales and revenue.

By far the most widely reported mobility challenge facing SMBs is insufficient battery life, which was cited by 71% of SMB organizations. Workarounds for battery life are increasingly plentiful, but these represent an additional cost that may strike someorganizations as unexpected or burdensome. Security issues remain a key concern for SMBs. Two-fifths of smaller companies find device security to be challenging and nearly a third cite network security as an issue.
A case in point: Nearly 10% of SMBs report that their mobile security has been compromised at least once and 39% believe that even though they've had no incidents reported, their security policies and safeguards need improvement. That makes sense, considering that most smaller organizations still take an ad hoc approach to mobile deployments. Few SMBs have specific security policies and procedures related to mobility. Most rely upon cell phone carriers, for example, to secure mobile communications.
Partly abridged version of the bMighty Research Report

Wireless Technologies Types

There are several different types of wireless technologies. Personal area networks (PANs) enable users to connect everyday devices wirelessly, such as digital cameras to printers, or handheld devices to earpieces. Wireless local area networks (WLANs) act as cable replacements for local area networks and are often referred to as Wi-Fi or 802.11. The third and most common type of wireless technology is the wireless wide area network (WWAN), which enables access through a wireless link that is regional, national, or global. These networks are not restricted to a specific physical location, such as a campus, as is the case with Wi-Fi.

Mobile Video Business - Promises to Expand Rapidly

Consumers and business users alike have come to rely on mobile voice and data communications. Now demand is building for mobile video services as well. ABI Research believes that the move to all-digital TV will pave the way for mobile TV services that can “attract over 500 million viewers by 2013.” [ABI] Add to this the revenue of other mobile video services and applications, and the market potential grows even larger. Infonetics projects worldwide mobile video service revenue to increase at a 5-year CAGR of 130%, reaching $35 billion by 2011 [Infonetics].
Traditional carriers see mobile video as a way to reverse declining Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) caused by the decline in revenue from voice-only services. Others, including application and infrastructure developers, see it simply as a major new opportunity. Wainhouse Research expects worldwide revenues for personal mobile video communications — including professional services, software, toolkits, and other infrastructure products — to grow to a billion dollar industry by 2010 [Wainhouse]. Mobile Video Service Examples
Dozens of video services are already available on the internet, and these services are beginning to be offered on mobile handsets as well. The services fall into two broad categories: consumer-oriented and business-oriented. The two lists presented here provide just a sample of mobile video service possibilities – and revenue opportunities.

Consumer-oriented mobile video focuses on entertainment and social networking:

• Mobile TV • Video on Demand (VoD) • Video sharing with family and friends • Viral video sharing • Video blogging • Conversational video • Video portal • Video messaging • Video SMS • Multimedia ring-back tone • Mobile advertising • Social networking

Business-oriented mobile video services emphasize enhanced communications and collaboration:

• Interactive Voice and Video Response (IVVR) • Conversational video • Video sharing between a business and its customers • Video training • Video messaging and video SMS • Video conferencing

The market for mobile video services promises to expand rapidly over the next several years. To exploit this opportunity, application developers and service providers must move quickly, providing innovative new services with the quality, responsiveness, and price points that users find attractive. But mobile video is a complex medium, presenting developers with a variety of technical challenges.

Mobile Technologies In Use

Adoption of wireless local-area networking (WLAN) technology is widespread and seems on the road to ubiquity; more than half of SMBs already use it, though that's still far short of cellular's 85% penetration. WiMax wide area networking, now in use at less than 10% of smaller companies, also holds promise. One lesser-known reason is that WiMax offers business continuity in the event of a failure on the part of standard Internet services. Although smaller companies typically do not create custom “mobile “ applications, increasingly, more packaged applications – and information services – will be pushed out to mobile devices. In the meantime, integration with desktop operating systems is helping to drive interest in Windows as a mobile operating system. The leading mobile operating systems in use are Windows at 80%, followed by Blackberry at 66%, and Palm OS at 37%.

Given the prevalence of cell phones in America, it's easy to assume that nearly every organization uses them. Odds are that many employees of almost any company use them at work on a regular basis. However, the design point of this study is whether the organization itself deploys mobile devices such as cell phones - not whether individuals use their own devices in the course of their work day. Even with that more-restrictive measure, cell phones are deployed by nearly four out of five SMBs. That edges out the three-quarters of smaller companies that deploy wireless laptops. More than two-thirds of companies use Smartphones equipped with voice and data capabilities.
Wireless laptops and Smartphones also top the list of most useful mobile devices. PDAs without voice capabilities, on the other hand, are moving down the list of usage and are cited as a mobile device SMB companies love to hate. A year from now, we expect to see wider deployment of handsets that use wireless Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology. SMBs may initially adopt VoIP phones mostly for wireless campus deployments. The fact that wireless-enabled laptops top Smartphones in perceived usefulness by SMBs is further evidence that neither basic productivity applications nor custom business applications are yet commonly available on Smartphones. The value of PDAs has steadily declined because their functionality has become an intrinsic part of Smartphones, which add the ability to communicate in real-time with voice and data. Eventually, PDAs will go the way of the Day-Timer, as they will be unable to match Smartphones' ability to synchronize calendars in real-time with co-workers or customers, for instance.

Mobile Device Platforms '09 - Fragmentation is Here to Stay

Although the market for web-enabled phones has strongly grown during the last years, the fragmentation of software platforms has stayed - none of the players can expect to dominate any major market. Vendors, developers and operators will continue to focus on the few platforms that matter most for their geographical regions – such as Windows Mobile, iPhone OS and Palm in North America, or Symbian and Windows Mobile in Europe. In addition to the various platforms, the number of form factors poses challenges: Most touchscreen phones are good enough systems for web-based applications, while this service delivery approach may not be feasible for smaller-screen devices.

Netbooks are increasingly sold in conjunction with mobile broadband packages – but operators who want to differentiate through applications have yet another OS or browser type to add to their list of platforms. The majority of application downloads continues to be MIDP Java games – a platform that many high-end internet devices do not support. Hence, most operators will continue their strategy of low involvement into mobile software design - only global players with high involvement in device supply chain and retail presence have a business case for commissioning, launching and supporting customized applications for flagship devices. For the majority of operators, generating profits with mobile applications comes through partnerships with companies providing development, testing and sales across various markets, ensuring high quality applications at acceptable cost.

Fixed-Line and Wireless Convergence

Why Fixed Mobile Convergence?

With fixed-mobile convergence (FMC), users benefit from the features and capabilities associated with both fixed-line and wireless networks. Service providers in this market are racing to deliver products that address ever-increasing employee mobility, growth in IP adoption, availability of WiFi networks, poor indoor mobile phone coverage, and — most important — enterprises' need for tools that help them improve employee efficiency, manage network complexity, and reduce costs.

The rapid growth of WLAN deployments in enterprises, hotspots and homes; the improving ability of WLAN access to provide high-quality voice service; and the introduction of dualmode handsets that can support both cellular (GSM, UMTS or CDMA) and WLAN radio are creating new market opportunities for service providers to deliver a comprehensive service that converges mobile and fixed-line infrastructures, beginning with voice.

Value
Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) promises a superior user experience delivered cost-efficiently and with unprecedented convenience. FMC offers service providers the potential for first-mover advantages to attract customers and gain momentum. It extends an opportunity for service providers to enter new markets and to bridge the wireless/wireline divide. But this isn’t just about voice. The industry sees video and multimedia as the means to capture customers and differentiate from client-centric solutions (e.g., Skype over WLAN) — in particular to take content from the existing world and customize it for delivery to mobile devices. The key to a successful FMC deployment is to compete not on price, but with value-added services.

Three approaches to FMC
There are currently three primary approaches in the industry to delivering a converged seamless service: Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA), VoIP Extension and IMS-VCC (Voice Call Continuity).

Strategies For The Emerging Mobile Workforce

Strategies For Managers Of Mobile Workers Painting a rosy picture of mobile workers without examining some of the risks and challenges would be irresponsible. Risk and benefits are often closely related. A benefit for one manager may be a risk for another. In the next two sections we look at a few of the risks and challenges associated with mobile workers.

• Potential Decrease in Productivity
Fears abound on this one. Can someone really work at home and be productive? What about all of the distractions? Then there are moments in projects or employees’ job responsibilities that require tight synchronization that is next to impossible to coordinate with the separation of distance and or time. If Cindy takes thirty minutes in the middle of her day to do yoga will that make her less productive? Opinions may vary but from Cindy’s perspective the answer is obvious. As long as people do not abuse the flexibility extended to them and we design workflows that support mobile workers, this concern of a decrease in workers’ productivity may be more irrational than many of us want to admit. Tied to loss of productivity is a deeper and more difficult issue: the loss of control and oversight. If you are migrating from a traditional workforce to a mobile one, you undoubtedly are reinventing your job as a manager. What you managed before was concrete. What you manage now is less tangible. This is not trivial. Essentially, managers are faced with no longer knowing how to do their jobs. Managers know their business but they are foreigners in an alien world of work. Well-designed workflows can mitigate some of these issues. Managers also need to reengineer their jobs and negotiate new performance management metrics with their bosses. Most of all, managers need to be patient with themselves and others. Mobile workers change the way we manage. It takes time to sort out all the rules of a new game and their implications.

• Influence Replaces Positional Power
Positional power exerts less influence with mobile workers. Without the daily four walls of an organization, remote workers are unlikely to perform their jobs in prescribed ways. Managers need strong influence skills. Since influence skills are relational in nature it takes to time cultivate the trust and interpersonal connections associated with them. Time is not always on our side. Lapses in management styles that revert to more coercive techniques may achieve short-term objectives but ruin managers’ chances of building strong twoway influential relationships with employees. There are no short cuts and the amount of energy and creativity it takes to cultivate influence with remote workers is one of the most difficult aspects of managing mobile workers.

• Fragile Project Dependencies
Coordinating deliverables with offsite employees, contractors, vendors, and partners is a risk familiar to all project managers. These risks need to be identified at the front end of a project and managed throughout its life cycle. As a general rule, the greater the number of dependencies assigned to resources less in your direct control, the larger your contingencies need to be. Even non-project-related work will naturally be prone to more delays with mobile workers. In both of these instances central project management can be subdivided into smaller areas of ownership. Create informal subgroupings around clusters of resources tied to a deliverable. This gives autonomy and increased flexibility to the people most affected by project dependencies.

• Information Sharing
The reduction of face-to-face interactions hampers information sharing. Many organizations are culturally challenged when it comes to sharing information. Isolation experienced by mobile workers compounds these tendencies. Technology can play a powerful role in addressing these challenges and can even nudge cultures towards more information-sharing practices.
Author:Terrence L. Gargiulo, the paper is supplied by Citrix Online

Wireless Deployment Strategies In Small Companys

Wireless technologies are proliferating through small and midsize businesses as the cost of handsets along with voice and data plans plunge to attractive, commodity levels. At SMB organizations, higher demand for mobile technology coincides with rising perceived business value of the technology. In the study, four out of five companies report that wireless voice and data networks are highly important and another 16% believe they are somewhat important. Not surprisingly, nine in ten companies with above-average deployments of wireless voice and networks rate those networks as highly important to their organizations. Companies with above-average deployments also tend to be more committed to mobility as a business and technology investment. This surge in importance is also reflected in SMB spending on mobile technology. Three out of five small and midsize businesses report that their spending on mobile technology increased compared to last year, and 36% report it stayed the same. Only 4% of companies report a decline in mobile technology spending – and that may be due to costsavings more than a decline in use. Companies with above-average wireless deployments are helping to drive this push. By a 66% to 55% margin, companies with above-average wireless deployments will invest more in the coming year than those firms with below-average wireless deployments. Clearly, satisfaction is helping to drive increased investment. Generally, small and midsize organizations feel that their investment in wireless technologies is paying off. Sixty-two percent of the companies in our study are highly satisfied with their investment in wireless voice and data technology and services. Significantly, a higher percentage of companies with above-average voice and data network deployments report an even higher level of satisfaction than their peers with smaller deployments. Sixty-nine percent of those widely deployed sites report that they are highly satisfied with their investment in wireless technologies, compared to 57% for below-average deployments. The more widely deployed networks appear to be generating more business value. In 2007, it's hard to imagine a company opening a new office with a strictly wired infrastructure. Wireless networks are now pervasive - with 42% of SMBs deploying a wireless network across the whole office or campus and 36% deploying in a limited manner, for example in conference rooms. Among companies with a wireless network, two-thirds offer wireless Internet access to guests such as business partners and contractors. Yet if companies are largely satisfied, why isn't deployment more widespread? Three out of five companies report that less than half of their employees use mobile technologies for work-related purposes. In most cases fewer than one-in-four employees use wireless for work-related purposes. The reasons for this limited deployment can be chalked up to several factors, we believe, such as: • Most use is ad hoc. In many small firms there are lots of users with different plans or devices
• Lack of custom or dedicated business applications
• Lack of management or administrative controls
• Security concerns
• Cost – mobility is a commodity for some companies but overhead for others. Cost is a gating factor when a company lacks plans to accrue revenue from its mobile networks or devices.
• Unlike larger enterprises, many smaller companies are used to having all personnel visible on site and may be less comfortable with a truly mobile workforce.
This report comes from CMP Technology

Netbook Tricks: Getting the Maximum of the Lively Guy

S. Appel from Mobile Tech Today gives some useful hints:
Another key trick: turn off the WLAN when it's not needed. Pressing "Ctrl+F11" will do just that instantly on most netbooks. Reactivating the wireless connection is just as quick. The same holds true for Bluetooth. Both wireless functions represent more than just an energy suck: they also provide a potential portal for hacker attacks.

The display is small and the computing power Relevant Products/Services is closer to that of an outdated PC. Yet because they are ideally suited for mobile use -- whether on the sofa or on the train -- netbooks are currently topping the electronics bestseller charts.

Even so, working with the low-priced mini-laptops is different than working with desktop computers or standard laptops. Most users start wondering how to tickle more performance Relevant Products/Services out of the machines almost as soon as they start working with them in earnest. Fortunately, there are a few tricks for juicing up the netbook -- without having to upgrade the hardware Relevant Products/Services at all.

Many of the devices are equipped with three-cell batteries that typically allow for up to three hours of unplugged use. Six-cell batteries allow for double that battery life. Yet even that span isn't enough for really long train rides, making energy Relevant Products/Services conservation a must: "To achieve the absolute longest battery life, you can manually adjust the display brightness to reflect the ambient lighting," explains Robert Perenz, product manager for netbooks at hardware maker Acer.

Many models provide this function through a specific key combination like "Ctrl+F5." Lowering the brightness by just one or two levels is often enough to provide a noticeable bump to the battery life. That's because the factory default for brightness is often the maximum level, which isn't really required at all in practical situations. After only a brief period, you won't notice that the brightness has been reduced at all.

Another key trick: turn off the WLAN when it's not needed. Pressing "Ctrl+F11" will do just that instantly on most netbooks. Reactivating the wireless Relevant Products/Services connection is just as quick. The same holds true for Bluetooth. Both wireless functions represent more than just an energy suck: they also provide a potential portal for hacker attacks. In principle it's also easy to lower the processor's energy demands. Yet that comes at a cost to performance. "This doesn't make a lot of sense for netbooks, which are already coming to the table short on performance," says Fabian Schusdziara from Dusseldorf-based PC Praxis magazine.

Somewhat older netbooks in particular often have too little storage. In such cases Schusdziara recommends so-called portable apps: applications that can be started from USB sticks or a hard drive without any prior installation. "That keeps the registry nice and clean," Schusdziara says.

Many pieces of software intended for a PC can be optimized for netbooks, including Firefox. The "Littlefox for Firefox" add-on automatically reconfigures the Internet browser to utilize as much space on the display as possible. Want to make a small screen look bigger? It helps if one-third of the screen isn't covered with ads when surfing the Internet -- another Firefox add-on called "Adblock" provides major assistance in that regard.

Christoph Prevezanos, author of "Das Netbook-Buch," recommends that users start with a bit of spring cleaning, namely by removing unneeded programs.

To prevent unnecessary burdens to the storage space, as well as to cut down on wireless data Relevant Products/Services fees, it's helpful to access e-mail accounts using IMAP. Unlike the common POP3 protocol, IMAP doesn't automatically download e-mail messages from the server. It instead first downloads only the subject lines.

Small as they are, netbooks are easy to steal. It's therefore a good idea to prevent anyone who finds the netbook from being able to exploit what's inside. Encryption using free software like TrueCrypt is key to that effort. The Open Source program makes it easy to encrypt single files or entire hard drives.

Managing Mobile Devices for your Frontline Workers

Source Sybase:
Did you know that up to 70% of enterprise data exists in various frontline settings, from laptops to handheld devices, to store and remote office environments?

Your frontline workers may have a variety of skills but they’re rarely IT savvy and certainly not security experts. Yet more than 75% of enterprises leave responsibility for security in the hands of the user – literally.

With the increase in the use of mobile devices, you likely have questions that are left unanswered when it comes to managing and securing those devices. Well, now your answers are just a page away with Mobile Device Management for Dummies®.
Use Mobile Device Management for Dummies® to discover how to:

- Manage your mobile devices and applications - Secure your mobile data - Unleash your workforce’s mobile potential - And much more.

The complete report is available to download as free here

Fly into the Sky with this iPhone GPS app

From Darleen Hartley;
Xewton and Alexander Gross bring you V-Cockpit GPS, an app for the iPhone. It is not actually a GPS unit that tells you how to find or get someplace. Rather, it contains a set of airplane cockpit instruments that tell you how fast you are traveling, or how high up you’ve climbed. V-Cockpit GPS says it features a “unique photorealistic way of displaying all your iPhone 3G’s sensory data”. You can configure your output depending on which side of the Pond you find yourself, or just your simple preferences. For example, data can be recorded and displayed in miles or kilometers.

This is not like a Flight Simulator, where you can sit and “play.” The precursor to the recent app, called simply Jet Cockpit will let you do that. However, the V-Cockpit GPS application expects you to be on the move. It will record Gs and altitude, so go fast and up. But don’t be the one doing the steering while viewing the output. Better to be in the back seat, or review the data at the end of your journey.

Cool features are the night vision mode, and you can even get radio chatter and jet engine sound effects, which are not on the Lite version which was released in April. You can calibrate your instruments like a pro. V-Cockpit GPS displays speed, acceleration, compass orientation, and other measurements in the style of an airplane’s instrument panel. It displays data on its speedometer, altimeter, variometer, accelerometer , and HUD. An interesting heads-up display (HUD) lets you reflect its data onto your car windshield.

Previous apps from this developer include Ski-o-Meter, which applies similar data to that provided by V-Cockpit GPS to the winter sports enthusiast’s activities. The app supplies GPS data recording, speed, altitude, and distance figures. A skier can get a picture of their maximum and average downhill speed, a diagram of the hill’s height profile, and just how far they have skied, before retiring to the lodge.

Other apps for this developer include Mad Shells, the traditional shell game with a few new quirks, such as meteor showers, jokers, and the ability to compete with other players around the world. Just for fun, try iQualizer, which is more eye candy - visual real time audio visualization - it turns sounds into abstract imagery in twelve different modes. You can see music or voice represented as colorful and moving diagrams, electrical charges, atomic blasts and what looks like pulsating city skylines.

Since its initial release in late January, V-Cockpit GPS has been upgraded to Rel 1.4.1. It is 4.6 MB for the 3G iPhone only. The developer warns, due to questions received on his site, that you need a GPS enabled device to get the full effect of the app. Duh.

Enterprise Mobility Space Needs Solutions Converge

Andrew Mitchell send me a email regarding "solutions converge on enterprise needs for mobility", he wrotes:
Probably the second most frequently heard “f” word in any discussion of enterprise mobility is FMC or fixed mobile convergence. And in terms of understanding, FMC ranks among the top entries in the “most often misunderstood mobility term” list, even in spite of being with the wireless industry for over 6 years now.

FMC has generally come to be understood as a technology that will deliver voice connectivity for a single service over a fixed or wireless network. Over time various proposed and practical implementations of FMC technology have emerged, largely falling into the category of either carrier based network solutions or appliance based customer premises solutions. Regardless of the technology employed the usual premise of FMC solutions is that they will bring value to an enterprise, either through reduced communications costs or by the improved productivity associated with an Anywhere employee.

Capitalizing on the growing enterprise interest in unified communications (UC) solutions, vendor Agito Networks offers an FMC solution that provides location awareness and presence features. The functionality of Agito’s RoamAnywhere product allows it to integrate into popular UC platforms such as Microsoft’s OCS or Cisco’s UCM for example. RoamAnywhere also provides support for a number of wireless LAN products from vendors such as Aruba, Cisco and Motorola. A number of wireless handsets and PDAs support the RoamAnywhere client. Agito’s product is just one example of a capable and compelling FMC product that addresses many of the UC needs of a mobile enteprise.

Initially viewed as a customer provided solution to a carrier’s coverage void in a macro wireless network, the third “f” word is femtocell. Femtocells are now receiving attention not only for the opportunities they create in the consumer market but also in the enterprise market. In an enterprise environment femtocells are well positioned to provide more than voice and UC solutions. The femtocell platform provides the ability to extend a broad suite of enterprise applications over 4G networks. Unlike its FMC counterpart, the femtocell is not a point solution for voice, UC or any specific enterprise application.

Yankee Group Senior Analyst Nathan Dyer has some cautions to offer enterprise femtocell vendors to avoid some of the pitfalls experienced by FMC vendors. In his paper “Femtos in the Enterprise Must Learn from FMC Mistakes”, Dyer advises that vendors should “not wed femtocells to mobile voice” and should instead “emphasize the mobile data and application story.” Dyer also points out a number of clear and present opportunities for femtocells to provide cost effective anywhere connectivity platforms for enterprise applications. He goes on to highlight the potential for integrated solutions in which FMC functionality is delivered through the femtocell platform and enterprise PBX environment.

In summary, FMC and femtocell technology has converged on the need for enterprise mobility. For success in this market FMC vendors should consider leveraging the power of femtocell platforms. Femtocell vendors will want to consider differentiation by positioning their products as enabling platforms for enterprise mobility.

Growth in Prepaid Wireless Service Continues

Mike Sachoff reports about prepaid wireless services;
Online visits and search referral activity to six leading prepaid wireless sites increased 37 percent over the previous year, according to a new report from comScore.
Growth in prepaid wireless was driven primarily by MyCricket (up 107%) and BoostMobile (up 105%), both of which more than doubled in visitation over the prior year. MetroPCS and Net10 also saw solid gains, growing 63 percent and 37 percent, respectively.
The marketing messages of most prepaid wireless providers are focused on the youth market, data indicates considerable interest in the plans among 35-64 year olds. The majority of visitors to Net10 (60.3 %) and TracFone (58.7%) were from this older age segment. Even for sites where the majority of visitors were under 35 years of age, 35-64 year olds made up at least 40 percent of visitors.
comScore also looked at search referral activity. The results showed that both paid and organic search are driving increased referral activity, but organic search is significantly outpacing paid search referrals overall.
A few of the sites performed well in receiving growth from organic search referrals compared to paid search referrals. Organic clicks to BoostMobile grew 310 percent, while paid clicks grew 199 percent. Organic clicks to MyCricket.com grew 123 percent compared to 63 percent growth in paid clicks; and organic clicks to MetroPCS.com grew 148 percent compared to 17 percent growth in paid clicks.