Do Smart Phones Really Lengthen Your Work Day by 2 Hours?

Much will be made of a study sponsored by Pixmedia that reportedly shows Britons work an additional 460 hours a year, on average, because of smart phones that allow them access to their email. 

The study by technology retailer Pixmania supposedly shows the average U.K. working day is between nine and 10 hours, with an additional two hours a day spent responding to or sending work emails, or making work calls.

Some will question the validity of "self reported" work hours. U.S. government surveys tend to show that although U.S. employees "work longer hours" than they used, to, the differences are relatively slight. 

Numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics show a very gradually rising trend through the 1990s that has only just recently tapered off, hovering somewhere just north of 40 hours weekly.

To be sure, the notion that people are being asked to work longer hours seems intuitively true, given job cuts since the Great Recession of 2008. The simple reality is that if the same amount of work has to be done, and there are fewer people to do that work, hours will lengthen. 

Also, some employers deliberately are choosing to employ fewer workers, but pay overtime, rather than hire new workers. All of that will tend to lengthen the average workday. Smart phones might have almost nothing to do with the trend. 

A survey sponsored by global professional services company Towers Watson and WorldatWork, an international association of human resource professionals, shows that nearly two thirds of respondents expect their employees to work more hours now than they did prior to the 2008 Great Recession and see this trend continuing for some time.

Without access to the actual Pixmania research methodology, it is difficult to assess the validity of the claims. But some might question whether typical self-reported daily work hours really do amount to 12 hours, with or without smart phones. 

More than 90 per cent of office workers have an email-enabled phone, with a third accessing them more than 20 times a day, the study apparently found. That has the ring of truth, but does not necessarily translate to a "longer work day."

Almost one in ten of the Pixmedia respondents said they spent up to three hours outside their normal working day checking work emails, and even those without a smart phone check emails on their home computer. Some checking is quite plausible. "Three hours" seems implausible. 


Also, there is a long-term change in work hours in the U.S. economy, for example. "Between 1979 and 2002, the frequency of long work hours increased by 14.4 percentage points among the top quintile of wage earners, but fell by 6.7 percentage points in the lowest quintile," according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Research.

In other words, high-income workers do work longer hours, but lower-income workers spend less time on the job. 

There is some truth to the notion that 40 hours of work is sort of considered "part time" work. 

During most of the 1900s, the hours of work declined for most American men, NBER says.  But around 1970, the share of employed men regularly working more than 50 hours per week began to increase. 

In fact, the share of employed, 25-to-64-year-old men who usually work 50 or more hours per week on their main job rose from 14.7 percent in 1980 to 18.5 percent in 2001.

This shift was especially pronounced among highly educated, high-wage, salaried, and older men. For college-educated men, the proportion working 50 hours or more climbed from 22.2 percent to 30.5 percent in these two decades, NBER says. 

Between 1979 and 2002, the frequency of long work hours increased by 14.4 percentage points among the top quintile of wage earners, but fell by 6.7 percentage points in the lowest quintile. There was no increase at all in work hours among high-school dropouts.

The point is that long term shifts in work hours might be occurring, but there also are likely impacts from economic conditions, the nature of work, the places where work occurs and the motivation to do such work. Smart phones are only a way of doing that work, not its cause. 

Value Based Pricing is Creeping into the Communications Business

“Value based pricing” has been discussed in the communications industry for some time, the theory being that it makes more sense to charge customers for communications-based services on the perceived “value” of the applications or access. 

The principle is similar to use of toll lanes on highways at rush hour. Some consumers are willing to pay extra to use the toll lanes. Most do not prefer to do so. To be sure, current regulatory rules that require all Internet access to be supplied in "best effort" fashion are impediments that prohibit service providers from creating such differentiated products. 

Still, when networks are congested, for example, many consumers will be willing to pay for priority access. That is an example of value based pricing. 

But value based pricing has been used for quite a long time in the communications business, in some ways. 

You might argue that the value of text messaging is not, in fact, directly related to its cost of supply, but on the usefulness of the app.

The shift to some modified version of “consumption-based” pricing for high-speed access, in place of an undifferentiated “unlimited” usage plan, is another example.

In the coming years, more "communication services" might be sold as part of some other product. Using mobile networks to deliver content to tablets provides one example, where the product a customer buys is a book, for example, and the network price is simply embedded into the overall cost of the delivered content. 

The same is true of video entertainment services. Customers want the video, not the network that delivers the video. The amount of network resources used to deliver HBO is not different from delivering an ad-supported news channel. But the price of those products is quite different.

In a similar way, mobile banking, payments or wallet services “use the network,” but the value proposition for end users is the applications. Likewise, text messaging is valuable to customers, but it is the ability to send and receive messages that is bought, not the use of the network.

Apple iPhone Owner Loyalty Declines, For the First Time Ever

For the first time since the Apple iPhone was released in 2007, the number of iPhone owners who say they definitely will or probably will purchase their next phone from the same brand has declined, a survey by Strategy Analytics shows. 

The survey found 75 percent of iPhone owners in Western Europe say they are likely to buy their next phone from Apple, down from 88 percent in 2011. Though most suppliers would love to have such "repeat buy" sentiment, that is a decline from all past surveys. 

U.S. repeat purchase intentions also have dipped a bit, down from 93 percent in 2011 to 88 percent in 2012, Strategy Analytics says. 

Internet Access Goes "Mobile First"

Consumers are migrating away from PC-based Internet usage and are increasingly using mobile devices as their default gateway to the Internet, according to  International Data Corporation. That shift to "mobile first" Internet access is especially pronounced in the U.S. market. 

In fact, perhaps for the first time, the number of people using PCs for Internet access is shrinking, even as PC access grows elsewhere in the world. That doesn't necessarily mean the number of fixed access lines drops, only that PCs are not the devices using those connections. 



Other studies back up those contentions. The use of mobile devices to access the Internet is becoming the medium of choice, with 69 percent of all Internet users surveyed doing so daily, according to Mobile Web Watch 2012, a study of consumers in Europe, Latin America and South Africa conducted by Accenture..

In addition, consumers are using multiple devices to connect to the web, including smart phones (61 percent), netbooks (37 percent), and tablets (22 percent), the Accenture study suggests.

The study found that emerging economies such as Brazil, South Africa and Russia also have rapidly adopted mobile devices (more than 70 percent, on average) to access the Internet, Accenture says.

Given their affordability, smart phones are more likely than other devices to serve as access gateways to the Internet in these emerging markets. This trend is set to continue, with a higher percentage of respondents in emerging markets expressing their intention to buy a Web-enabled mobile phone in the near future (Brazil, 78 percent;  Russia, 73 percent; Mexico, 61 percent; and South Africa, 57 percent) as compared with an average of 46 percent for all countries surveyed.

In developed European economies, mobile Internet is also on the rise. In Germany, adoption of mobile Internet access using smart phones has tripled since 2010 (from 17 to 51 percent), the study found.

In Switzerland, today 67 percent of respondents use Web-enabled mobile phones to go online, compared to 27 percent in 2010. In Austria, the percentage of mobile Internet users has doubled in two years (from 31 to 62 percent).

Information apps, such as train schedules, the weather, or news are the most popular downloaded apps, according to 72 percent of survey respondents, followed closely by entertainment apps (70 percent).

And there is confirmation of the importance of access network quality. Fully 85 percent of the respondents said that the “quality of the network” was the most important factor in selecting a smart phone or tablet.
 
As you would expect, “communications” leads applications used frequently by mobile Internet users. Sending or receiving e-mails through an installed program is the most popular feature among all respondents (70 percent), followed by accessing online communities (62 percent) and instant messaging (61 percent).

Respondents in the emerging markets of Mexico and South Africa are the biggest users of mobile email and instant messaging (more than 80 percent of respondents in both countries).  Among all respondents, 27 percent use their mobile device for tweeting and blogging, and 46 percent use mobile devices to conduct banking transactions.



In the United States., the number of people accessing the Internet through PCs will shrink from 240 million consumers in 2012 to 225 million in 2016. At the same time, the number of mobile users will increase from 174 million to 265 million.

In 2015, for the first time ever, there will be more U.S. consumers accessing the Internet through mobile devices than through PCs.

"There has been much talk about how the future of the Internet will be mobile first and PC second. In the United States, that future is now," says  Karsten Weide, IDC program vice president.

Online PC activities will be affected as consumers take their usage mobile. That, in turn, is going to shape the nature of business models and revenue streams for all other suppliers in the mobile Internet ecosystem. 

IDC expects that the share of users accessing social networks such as Facebook on their PCs will decline from 66 percent in 2012 to 52 percent in 2016, for example.

Global mobile advertising will grow from $6 billion in 2011 to $28.8 billion in 2016.

Global  business-to-consumer mobile commerce spending will grow six fold between 2011 and 2016, as well, reaching $223 billion by 2016, IDC says. 

"The Great PC exodus on the Internet is happening because the PC was never truly a consumer product," added Weide. "Many consumers use them because there was no better alternative. Now, with the huge and growing installed base of more user-friendly tablets and smartphones, there are."

App Store Revenue Shows "Long Tail"

App store revenue, at least for Apple iOS and Android app stores, now shows a clear "long tail" or "Pareto" distribution. In other words, six or so apps account for about 55 percent of total application revenue (from all sources, including app sales, in-app revenue and advertising). 

Keep in mind that the iTunes App Store and Google Play now offer more than 600,000 apps each. 

Looking at app sales and in-app revenue only, and excluding ad revenue, in 2012, Flurry estimates that the top 25 apps will earn about half of total revenue.

The rest of the top 100 apps will earn about 17 percent of revenue in 2012. 

Branded Retail Stores Essential in Saturated Mobile Markets, Says Optus

Australian mobile service provider Optus now says a branded retail store strategy is more important in Australia's saturated mobile services market, and is shifting effort in that direction. 

“As the Australian mobile market matures and we move from a period of growth to one of customer retention, we need a distribution model that reflects this,” said Rohan Ganeson, Optus Optus managing director. “There is too much capacity in the mobile distribution market and we have made a decision to rationalize our third party distribution channels, while strengthening our branded Optus channels.”

Optus is opening 33 new stores as well, with a focus on customer service and education as much as sales. 

German Mobile Point of Sale Launch fo riZettle

 iZettle, the Sweden-headquartered firm that sells a dongle similar to Square, has entered the German market, working with  DZ Bank and Deutsche Telekom.

Deutsche Telekom, Europe’s largest carrier, will distribute the iZettle reader in Deutsche Telekom retail stores.

It is not immediately clear whether Telekom benefits financially in a direct sense other than earning a sales commission for each device sold, though iZettle obviously increases the value of a connected tablet or smart phone, and thereby offers an indirect driver of mobile subscriptions for Deutsche Telekom. 

The service was first launched in the summer of 2011 in Sweden, and now individuals and small businesses is in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and the United Kingdom.

“The cooperation with iZettle is a further step for Deutsche Telekom to strengthen the relevance of mobile payments in Germany and to position itself as a relevant player in the payment market, said Thomas Kiessling, Chief Products and Innovation Officer at Deutsche Telekom.

Equens, a joint venture of DZ BANK with other major European banks, will process iZettle payments in Germany. Starting in November, the iZettle solution will be available at selected Volksbanken Raiffeisenbanken.