By contrast social networking, the top internet phenomena of recent years, received surprisingly few votes, with Facebook collecting only 19%, and Twitter just 6%. As a sign of how much UK consumers are now relying on staying connected while on the move, mobile broadband came in second in the poll, receiving 35% of the votes.
Jay Seaton, chief marketing officer at Airwide Solutions commented: “As pioneers in mobile, Airwide has seen the mobile industry continue to innovate over the last two decades – from the sending of the first text message back in 1992 to the ‘app phenomenon’ of 2009. As we see mobile innovation accelerating, it is becoming increasingly critical that barriers to development and adoption are pushed aside.
“The trickling stream of mobile innovation has become a torrential river, and the question is no longer ‘what is the next killer app’ but ‘what is the killer multipurpose utility’ that will enable a new generation of innovative, powerful, feature rich applications and services to be quickly and easily created, launched and adopted. One key element is to ensure that mobile operators have the right infrastructure and tools in place to help them use the network, device and subscriber intelligence they have (on messaging channels, browsing, user profiling, presence, security, charging and location) to enrich and support the subscriber experience with this myriad of new innovations,” added Seaton.
He continued: “In the case of GPS and location based services in particular, the mobile world is realizing that location can become a valuable enhancement to make the services that operators offer their subscribers more relevant, actionable and personal. As an increasing number of mobile devices (such as smartphones) offer built-in GPS, and because operators can now expose location APIs even for non-GPS phones, the addressable market for LBS will continue to greatly increase.”
Key findings from the survey include: Almost half (44% ) of people surveyed ranked GPS enabled navigation devices as the top technology innovation of the last decade; Mobile broadband came second with 35% of the votes, followed by the iPhone with 32% of the votes; Both men and women identified GPS as the number one innovation (48% for men, 42% for women). For women, the revolutionary games console, the Nintendo Wii, was the second greatest innovation (receiving 36% of votes); for men, the Wii ranked only fifth (receiving 23% of votes). The men’s second most popular choice was the LCD TV, which women surveyed placed at number five
Music and video streaming technologies fared poorly in the survey (with Spotify and YouTube receiving just 18% of votes between them), as did social networking phenomenon, Twitter, receiving just 5%of the votes
The survey was carried out on behalf of Airwide by global independent market research agency, Opinion Matters.