Recent studies conducted by leading search engine companies indicate that a large number of mobile searches have local intent. At first glance, this might sound a bit confusing. But, it isn’t too difficult to understand.

Let’s look at this from a user’s or a prospective consumer’s perspective, which is Me. I am searching for a restaurant specializing in barbeque, which is not too far from where I stay. I search for such a restaurant using my web enabled mobile; this I do by putting in a query that asks Google or any search engine to list the links of restaurants offering barbeque near my locality.

I will get the links, with the address and the phone number.

Advantage for businesses

Now that you have a gathered a fair bit of understanding about mobile searches with local intent, let’s talk about why it’s important for your business. Estimates are that almost one third or all mobile searches have local intent. This means more and more people are searching for businesses, restaurants, hotels, and all sorts of vendors that have a local address. You, as a business need to figure on such local searches. Otherwise, you are going to lose out on your prospective customers. 

Closer to Your Customers

For any business, it’s important that it is closer to its customers. Think about it for a second.  Which is the kind of customer that you have a better chance of attracting – a customer who is conducting a local search or a universal search? Both have their own advantages, but ‘local intent’ is much better placed to attract customers.

It’s a good idea for all businesses irrespective of their size, but it is even a better idea for small businesses. For e.g. If I am searching for a plumber, more than his website, I want his address and/or his contact details. So, for somebody with a plumbing business, it makes more sense to be a part of local mobile search.

The years ahead are definitely going to see an increase in the percentage of local mobile searches. As the use of web enabled mobile phones increases, so will the use of location based mobile searches. It’s a win-win situation for businesses, who wish to improve their local visibility and in turn want to improve the performance of their business.

It’s crazy! But it’s true! More and more people are getting hooked on to their mobile apps than ever before. And this craze sees no signs of losing steam. And why would it? These apps are making things a tad easier for users and making sure that the wheels of their life run smoothly.

It’s either the Smartphone or Nothing

It’s a no contest. People are lining up to get their hands on smartphones. The ordinary mobile phones are fast being kicked into the nearest trash cans.  The World is in the throes of an iPhone revolution; android based phones are cutting a swathe through the market; BlackBerry is the phone of choice for the business user; Symbian smartphones are scaling the popularity charts; and all this is a result of the kind of mobile apps being developed for these smartphones. 

The love for applications

So, why are users getting hooked onto these applications? What’s the secret behind the addiction? The answer lies in the practical usability of these applications and also their inherent interest quotient. Studies indicate that mobile apps are the staple diet of an increasing number of users. Their day literally begins and ends with a mobile app or two. Various published studies indicate that before a person gets out of bed he/she uses a mobile app/s. It could be anything - a weather app, a Social Networking app, or an app offering information about some aspect of their daily routine; it can be said without a shred of doubt that mobile apps open a person’s eyes to a new day.

The emotional connect

In a world where people are finding it difficult to connect with friends and family, a mobile apps is their connection with the World at large. You know you are connected to everybody who is important to you at all times of the day. When it comes to mobile apps, social media applications are right at the top of the popularity charts.  These applications help users bond with their family and friends, also interact with others of their ilk, leading to new connections.  All this leads to the kind of emotional security that most people are looking for.

Good news for mobile apps development

The all-pervading influence of the apps culture has led to a windfall for mobile application development companies. They are in great demand as businesses want to tap this bottomless potential of mobile apps for their benefit. They are coming out with new and innovative apps that not only appeal to the sensitivities of the target users, but also engross users through their applicability.

If you are a business, it’s time that you made use of the craze for mobile apps to further your business interests. And for this, you need to take the help of a reputed apps development company. This is the kind of company that has made it a habit to offer only the best mobile applications, that are both user friendly and in line with all client specifications.

Developing mobile compatible websites is a new marketing trend benefiting companies by attracting an additional traffic of mobile users. Therefore, online businesses have started looking at mobile commerce or M-commerce as another profitable option. Opting development of a mobile commerce website over that of a mobile app can also be cheaper and more beneficial in terms of reaching out to the customers.

However, shopping cart development for M-commerce should particularly take into account the preferences of mobile users and the small size of mobile screen. Here are some important factors to consider while designing and developing an M-commerce shopping cart website:

• A similar design and methodology as the parent site should be applied for the M-commerce version, while keeping in mind the small screen size of the mobile device. This is because many customers would want to have the same kind of browsing and buying experience as they would have had on the parent version.
   
• Customers should be at no real disadvantage using the M-commerce version instead of the Ecommerce one. If exact products are found with the same availability as on the traditional version, customers will have fewer reasons to dissatisfy. To add to user experience and satisfaction, the mobile version should also offer them other features such as full product specs with quality photos included.
   
• Mobile users are generally in a hurry and want a smooth and pain-free process. Therefore, the checkout process should be abbreviated. There should be as fewer steps as possible on a customer’s way to checkout.
   
• The users should be able to quickly sort through the products to find what they are looking for. Good product filters are vital. Making product finding easy is also necessary considering that connection quality may be an issue with mobile access.

It’s high time now that we all start looking at mobile phones as devices of daily-life functions serving our personal and professional lives. The user group of the communication function has transformed into a whole new user group that’s using the feature-packed mobile phones and gadgets for purposes that may not usually be associated to mobile devices in the past. Businesses and individuals have been smart in discovering iPhone and several other smarphones as lucrative platforms and have used great wisdom in encouraging and producing mobile phone websites and applications.

The development which we all can see in the form of iPhone-compatible websites or iPhone apps, or mobile-compatible websites or applications in general, is clearly a developer’s business or an app owner’s revenue. Why do businesses or organizations need to participate in it? Or, in other words, are they at any loss if they don’t learn how mobile phones and their functions can improve business intelligence and lead to a better work system? Yes, this is the right time that companies learn to adapt to the mobile use trends and take this hot move of making mobile phone websites or applications for business purposes. There are many benefits of doing this, which otherwise they would never experience. Here I explain the major ones in brief:

Higher accessibility: People can’t take their computer units or laptops wherever they go. Besides, they don’t anymore need to rely on the traditional ways to connect to the internet, i.e. through computer or laptop. In such a situation they have come to rely on the mobile phones; all they need is the cell coverage to be able to access the internet from their phones. Your mobile website or application can be their chosen access while they are on the move and your user base automatically widens up with the addition of these mobile users.

Direct marketing: If you have discovered that your target market belongs to those specific types of people who like accessing and using services on the mobile, you can directly market your business by creating a mobile version of your website and prevent the loss of such customers. It has been discovered that usually people accessing mobile sites and using their features are of a loyal type, and therefore, you can easily build brand loyalty via mobile marketing.

Cost-effectiveness: Businesses that have low marketing budgets, small businesses for instance, are always on the lookout for innovative marketing ways that provide economical solutions. Mobile applications or websites are not very costly projects if you compare them with heavy duty web projects. These are great marketing solutions in low budgets. Think of innovative ways such as creating an application that ties in to your online presence and compliments your existing website and social networking pages!

Now, it’s on you whether you want these benefits for your business or see others taking these and getting ahead of you. No way you choose the latter one….will you?

iPhone App Store has got yet another bigger functional niche, as prodigious as many other wondrous virtues iPhone itself has, known as iPhone web apps (short of web applications). iPhone web apps combine the power and versatility of the internet with the functionality and simplicity of Multi-Touch technology. The iPhone web app corner of Apple Store currently owns several hundreds of web apps.

Just think of an app need and you can find an iPhone web app to fulfill it. You get them in all the regular app categories such as entertainment, sports, travel, news, productivity, search, utility, and so on, allowing you to further customize your iPhone in the most ways possible.

YouTube, AOL, ESPN, Reuters, NASA, and the online giant Google – everyone is with web apps, so is Apple now that has very well perfected this concept. There were Java and Python web apps and web apps were getting designed for practically every Web 2.0 friendly programming language, but iPhone compatibility was always in question. With iPhone providing tools to write iPhone compatible web apps, web apps have got a confirmed iPhone nativity.

The route for distributing web apps on the Apple site is simple. Any iPhone-savvy web developer can sign up for a free online membership to Apple Developer Connection (ADC) and submit his iPhone web program for the users to enjoy. What more, Apple offers clear, extensive guidelines and instructions on producing iPhone-worthy web apps so that one really can put his best work to the iPhone web app collection. You also get a lot of web app promotion and marketing literature on the internet to help you out in winding up on the most iPhones possible.

In the end, just a small picture of what you can get by downloading iPhone web apps to your iPhone home screen:

• Movie show times
• Public transportation routes, schedules, and fares
• Latest sports news
• Lotteries
• Stock updates
• Fuel prices
• Food recipes
• Household management tips
• Employment and recruitment
• Latest ringtones
• Blog updates
• Gaming with all the popular games available to download, like Chess, Sudoku, and Tic-Tac-Toe, and modern video gaming
• Connecting on popular social networking and social bookmarking sites