Cheers! It's mobile time

If you’re doubting fully integrating mobile into your business model, take a good hard look at Uber. As reported in this week’s Searchlight, many finance professors argued Uber wasn’t worth the $17 billion price tag indicated by investors this spring. But their argument, it seems, was based on a false premise. Let’s call it, prehistoric thinking.

Uber is “already way past what the total addressable market was [and is] creating significant new value,” according to consultant Michael Davies, one of the speakers at “The Future of Mobile” event some of us at SearchCIO attended this week.

Put another way, Uber is one of those pesky disruptive innovation companies we’re all familiar with, thanks to Clay Christensen, the Harvard Business School guru.  Taxi drivers aren’t the only ones being disrupted by mobile apps; it’s pretty likely many industries will be in danger of being disrupted before this mobile thing is over.

As Sales suggests: “If companies don’t make a concerted effort to incorporate mobile into their business strategies now, they are courting oblivion.”

(What are you waiting for? It seems Yahoo got that memo, announcing this week that  it had purchased Flurry, the mobile add and analytics platform that runs on 1.4 million mobile devices.)

Also in this week’s Searchlight, Dropbox is adding new features that it hopes will lure more users, Facebook is testing a “buy” button that lets users purchase products from ads without ever leaving the Facebook site, and so much more.