If you are a CEO of a small-cap or mid-cap company and have been considering a mobile strategy, then you absolutely have to see the blow away numbers in a comScore report that came out in March. If you’re not considering a mobile strategy, then you need to see these numbers even more.
For our part, AGORACOM has been planning its mobile strategy for a while now and you can expect to see significant announcements shortly, as well as, some commentary below.
HIGHLIGHTS OF THE REPORT
- The number of people using their mobile device to access news and information on the Internet more than doubled from January 2008 to January 2009.
- Among the audience of 63.2 million people who accessed news and information on their mobile devices in January 2009, 22.4 million (35%) did so daily; more than double the size of the audience last year.
PERTINENT FINANCIAL DATA AND QUOTE
- The number of daily users trading stock or accessing financial accounts jumped 188% from 1.135 million users to 3.274 million users.
“Over the course of the past year, we have seen use of mobile Internet evolve
from an occasional activity to being a daily part of people’s lives.”This underscores
the growing importance of the mobile medium as consumers become more reliant
on their mobile devices to access time-sensitive and utilitarian information.”
Mark Donovan, senior vice president, mobile, comScore.
HOW DO YOU GET MOBILE?
There are several ways to get mobile from creating an app for iPhone and Blackberry, to partnering with someone like Viigo to get your RSS feeds into the mainstream. However, this is tough for many small cap and midcap public companies for two reasons.
First, they rarely have the resources or tech knowhow to execute such strategies.
Second, even if you have the resources and knowhow, 99% lack the critical mass to make it successful. In other words, once your mobile strategy is engaged by a few hundred shareholders and a few board members using it, then what? How do you scale to reach the millions and millions of investors out there?
THE SOLUTION
In order to make a mobile strategy effective, small cap and mid cap stocks need to come together under one umbrella in order to create an offering that provides plenty of fresh news and information for consumption by investors. As 1 company, you’re not going to get a mobile investor to keep returning to your mobile site/app. As 100, 200, 300 companies, an investor is far more likelier to keep returning for morsels of valuable news and information.
Here comes the shameless promotion. AGORACOM is already one of only 13 financial content providers to every Blackberry device on the planet. However, we are now looking to replicate our online success into the mobile space. It’s coming fast and it is coming soon. Most importantly, it will be multi-faceted and include:
- Multiple apps
- Multiple devices
If you want to know more, you know where to find us. Hope this report and my subsequent comments have been helpful.
Regards,
George