Mobile & Wireless
Almost half of SMEs use smartphones for business
Entrepreneurs are driving the trend survey notes
By Anh Nguyen | Computerworld UK | Published 08:22, 06 September 10
Nearly half of SMEs in the UK use smartphones for business purposes, a new survey has found.
The ‘Quarterly Survey of Small Business in Britain’ found that 48 percent of small firms use smartphones for email, or for the Internet for business, with a further nine percent planning to embrace mobile technology this year.
Also in this channel
The Open University Business School, Barclays and the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) questioned 833 businesses for the survey.
“Businesses are motivated by the ease, decreasing costs and the exceptional increase in power we’re seeing in handsets,” said Steve Cooper, managing director of Barclays Business.
He added: “We’ve reached a point where smartphones are running many of the applications that once needed a decently powered laptop. Businesses can log on, make payments, send through an invoice, do their word-processing and catch up on emails – while standing at a patisserie in Lille.”
The survey found that entrepreneurial businesses were driving the adoption of smartphones, with 65 percent of these firms currently using the technology. Professor Colin Gray from the OU Business School noted that this has been a growing trend over recent years.
Virgin Media Business recently polled 5,000 businesses across the UK and found that only a third use social media, with Twitter the most popular platform.
