Administrators always want to look at metrics to decide if it is “worth” investing resources into a “new” technology or paradigm. One of these “new” technologies/paradigms in higher ed is mobile content delivery. Citing that there is no way to know if students are going to make use of mobile friendly resources, they will often defer action on resourcing those projects until it is too late. Of course there are some that see the writing on the wall and jump ahead and get great feedback from students, but the vast majority are content to sit back and wait… the typically conservative “it’s been this way for a hundred years” mentality.
But now thanks to mobile data being so expensive and companies like Opera routing data through their servers to compress that data, we have some data. TechCrunch’s article on Opera reports :
Last month, more than 35.6 million people used Opera Mini (which is now serving over 500 million pageviews per day on average on a wide range of mobile devices), up 11.5% compared to August 2009 and more than 150% compared to September 2008. The Norway software developer also claims more than 2 petabytes of data is now processed by its servers on a monthly basis. That’d be 2,000 terabytes.
Opera (State of the Mobile Web) is not alone in the “compress first” browser biz, there is also the newcomer Bolt (rendering 1.4M pages/day – assuming 32kb/page that comes to 5.34 GB per day) and the old stalwart RIM. All that data moving through central servers certainly does suggest that the Mobile Web is here it stay and should be at least given the time of day by higher ed.
Canadian numbers are also suggesting that there is an increase in mobile data:
Interestingly, there has also been a rise in the last 18 months of an ‘other’ category – widely suspected to be Mobile Broadband Sticks, Netbooks and Smartphone users.
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