Your home: The centre of mobile innovation in 2012 [Report]

Your home is where you relax, feel safe, and take five minutes for yourself at the end of a long day. According to research firm Analysys Mason, it will also be the centre of mobile innovation in 2012.

The research firm reckons that a large portion of mobile innovation in 2012 will be driven by the fact that smartphones are rapidly replacing PCs as people’s preferred home computing device.

Citing figures from Google, Analysys Mason reckons that some 93% of smartphone owners use their devices from home. Figures from UK regulatory body Ofcom, meanwhile, suggest that 15% of people use a computer less after purchasing a smartphone.

This makes sense. After all, you can check your emails, access social networks and get the latest news and stock figures on your smartphone. These are all activities that would previously have been confined to a PC.

The natural evolution of convergence technologies, such as the kind that allow you to use your smartphone as remote for your smart TV, for instance, points to the smartphone becoming an increasingly central device in our home lives.

According to Ronan de Renesse, lead analyst for Analysys Mason’s Mobile Broadband and Mobile Content and Applications research programmes “the mobile/home interaction paradigm is set to bring a new platform for innovation to the applications space”.

Although the potential for innovation is massive, de Renesse cautions that “the corresponding revenue opportunity is unclear, because little or no consumer spend is allocated to those applications that are seen by service providers more as a churn reduction tool than a stand-alone revenue generator.”