I’ve just completed a pretty compelling business case requested by a client. It’s in the mobile space and I thought I’d share the introduction as it made interesting reading.

We’ve seen the meteoric rise of smartphones driven by Apple after the death of Nokia’s Symbian. Not so widely known are the reasons why.

The simple answer is the convergence of three trends: computing, connectivity, and cloud computing. Basically, devices are getting smaller, faster, cheaper, and more powerful; the same is true of processors. Today, roughly 700 million public servers are connected by the Internet, and this pervasive connectivity is being driven further into our daily lives, as evidenced by individuals and companies relying on services like Twitter to constantly share information. Finally, cloud computing not only is essential for storage of sophisticated amounts of data, which can be accessed by multiple devices, but also is paving the way for a new generation of applications and powerful, interlinked systems. These three waves are not new, nor is their intersection. What is new, however, is that the point of intersection is now a phone – a phone that’s blazingly fast, is connected to the Internet, and leverages the power of the cloud.

• 150,000,000 smartphones were sold in Q1 this year
• The number of smartphone searchers doubles every two months
• eBay sells something via a mobile phone every two seconds
• In 2010, Google became a ‘mobile-first’ company (this means they develop their sites and tools on mobiles first)
• Smartphone sales overtook PC sales last year (two years earlier than expected)
• In three years time, tablet sales will be bigger than PC sales
• 52% of UK mobile phone users have a smartphone
• 28% of internet usage is from a mobile phone
• 20% of search queries are from mobiles (was 11% in 2011)
• 12% of UK population have a tablet
• Tablet sales growing 378% year on year
• 38% of UK tablet owners spend more time on their tablet than watching TV
• 53% of people in the UK are ‘dual screening’ (using phone whilst watching TV for example)

It’s fair to say that most companies must have a mobile-optimised presence. The alternative is to say good-bye to the digital channel. All software giants are now adopting a “Mobile-First” development credo which dictates that ALL development is done on mobiles first, then ported to tablets and finally rendered on conventional laptops.

Odd to see how the death of the old Symbian-based phone fell at the perfect intersection of technology and communication and has, ultimately, led to the fall of Nokia. In 2007, Nokia was valued at 110 billion EUR, in May 2012, its valued at 14.8 billion EUR that’s a massive 85%+ drop in just 5 years. Gulp.