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Mobile big bang, mobile office, smartphone, business model, ERP, CRM, SCM
EXPLOSIVE SMARTPHONE GROWTH
The global smartphone craze has led to an explosion in mobile Internet use, ushering in a mobile era. As mobile phone manufacturers like Samsung Electronics and Apple race to introduce their high-performance smartphones, one out of five people in the world is projected to have a smartphone by 2011. In just five years, the rate of smartphone users has grown from five out of every 100 to 20 out of every 100. It took fixed-line phones 31 years to reach that level, the Internet eight years and cellular phones six years. The global explosion in mobile devices, including smartphones, is also expected to ignite exponential growth in mobile traffic, which already has had annual average growth of over 108 percent. By 2014, mobile traffic is projected to reach 3.6 million terabytes (TB), which is 39 times that of 2009.
2010 is the first year of runaway adoption of the smartphone in Korea. As of June, the number of smartphone users in Korea stood at 2.2 million, a 300 percent upsurge from the end of 2009. This figure is expected to exceed four million in 2010. The mobile big bang will bring radical changes to corporate management styles, not to mention the whole spectrum of lifestyles, including individual leisure and formation of social relationships. According to a survey of Korean executives, conducted in April, 14.1 percent had already adopted a mobile office system, and 25.1 percent of them planned to join the trend.
The survey clearly shows that the mobile office is indeed on the road to turning mainstream in Korea. The mobile era is manifested in the demolition of the wall between online and offline life, and genuine personalization. With employees working away from the office (offline) being able to access the information anywhere at anytime, the division between online and offline has become blurred. Employees away from the office, for example, are spared the inconvenience of returning to their workplace to get needed information. Leveraging this advantage, smartphones are offering convergence services that combine offline activity with online information, i.e. augmented reality (AR) and location-based Social Network Services (SNS). Meanwhile, mobile phone users are provided with location-...