Tech and enterprise business have long gone hand-in-hand, with tech supporting and business driving tech innovation. And 2017 won’t be an exception to the rule; in fact, it appears that 2017 will be a big year for tech and business, with some notable changes. Some of these changes will be immediately beneficial (Mixed Reality is one example of this); others may appear to be problematic as they force businesses to innovate – or else.

So, as we do every year, we’re going to discuss our predictions for tech and business in 2017. But first a word on what we won’t be talking about in any depth today: VR/AR/MR or AI. Why? Because we’ve talked a lot about alternate realities already, and their potential impacts on business are already pretty well researched. If you would like to know more about Digital Realities or AI, please check out our blog.

Retailers, Go Mobile or Go bust

Adobe recently released its report on digital retail sales and patterns as of the Close of business, Black Friday. And the numbers (which, by the way, was based off a whopping 24.6 billion visits to shopping websites), if not surprising to those who watch the industry, were impressive, especially when compared to the numbers in the same period for brick-and-mortar stores.

First 91.7 billion dollars worth of online retail sales alone were made on Black Friday. That’s $115 million above what Adobe predicted AND an 11% increase from last year. Now let’s compare that to the numbers from Brick-and-Mortar stores: RetailNext reported that foot traffic at malls dropped nearly 13% as compared to last year. That’s pretty amazing, but not quite as amazing as the fact that sales also dropped nearly 10%.

But again, anyone paying attention to the trends in the last few years would not be overly surprised by this trend. We’ve been seeing the growth of online retail for a while now, and a significant decrease in brick-and-mortar sales is to be expected. The real news to come out of Adobe’s report was the success of Mobile (and of Amazon).

SmartPhones and Tablets accounted for half of all visits to retail websites, coupled with an almost 25% increase in revenue over last year (for a $28.23 billion dollars in total revenue). What’s more important, is that Amazon got 38% of all money spent between the beginning of November and the end of December. The next closest? Best Buy with 3.9%

What does this mean? Well, being Mobile First is clearly 100% necessary. But more than that, it seems that a sole online focus (like Amazon) is more beneficial than have a physical and online retail presence. So, want to build your own mobile-friendly eCommerce site, or an mCommerce app, contact Silicon Valley’s experts today.

Social Media as a Business Model will Grow

Social Media was really the big winner of 2016. Over the past year, App Analytics company Flurry has tracked numerous data metrics, including in-app time. What did they find? A 69% increase as compared to this time last year. This number (derived from a massive sample population of nearly 1 million apps, over 2 billion devices and more than 3 trillion sessions) was driven mostly by Social Media and messaging apps.

Plus, YouTube is introducing new ways for Content Creators to monetize their work; Facebook’s new role in News was widely discussed in this election cycle; and Twitter just partnered with PBS to Live Stream President-Elect Trumps inauguration on January 20th. But the network sites were outperformed by the Messaging Apps.

In fact, the time users spent in Messaging and Social Media app in 2016 increased almost 400% in the last year. This is easily the most staggering statistic we will write about today. Additionally, it is now confirmed that the top four Messaging apps (WhatsApp, FB Messenger, WeChat, and Viber) have damn near 3 billion Monthly Active Users (MAU) between them. This actually outnumbers the number of users on the four largest Social Media sites.

So what does this mean? Well, Messaging apps seem to be the default, go-to app for most of the world. Moreover, it indicates that services operating within a Messaging App ecosystem will grow in demand and popularity. This includes ChatBots, which allow retailers and other businesses to offer in-messaging app services. The most prominent example of this is Facebook’s Messenger, which offers a robust development kit to help retailers and business owners rapidly create a Bot for their organization – call us now to learn more (408.805.0495).

The Death of the Mobile App (or Not)

Another noteworthy result of the aforementioned Flurry report was that mobile apps weren’t doing as well in the last year. Though app usage grew by 11%, Flurry argues that the App Market may have just reached it’s peak. Part of the reason is that though usage grew by 11%, it grew by almost 60% last year.

But, like energy, the business of apps won’t die. It will change into something else. Most things do. First, apps are a broad term for pretty much any sort of human-program interface. In other words, Apps are a User’s door to the internet or web-based services; And yea there are a lot of apps and doors out there. But we still need both.

Plus, there’s a whole vast support network for apps, just like doors: APIs, Marketing, Data Analytics, ChatBots (especially with how well Messaging apps are doing), algorithms and more are all needed to make apps successful. Business Infrastructure is always an excellent enterprise venture, especially when you have access to a premiere app development company.

So, whether you want to start your own app empire, or build an app infrastructure company. SDI can help. Give us a call at 408.805.0495/408.621.8481 – or click to contact us!