Travel & Leisure and the mobile web The impact of the mobile web on travel: 31% of passengers use a smartphone to check-in for their flight and 17% use a mobile boarding pass (this percentage is not higher only because many airports and airlines still aren't equipped to use this technology to its fullest capability. In fact, 73% of travelers said they would use mobile boarding passes if they could). Traveler in general are heavy users of smartphone devices, and use them for a range of travel related activities such as information search, maps, and booking hotels, car rental, flights, etc.

Travel & Leisure Directory

Smartphones are becoming the new frontier for gambling

The casino industry sees the mobile web as the next great frontier. Instead of having to physically go to Las Vegas in order to spin a slot machine or play a game of blackjack, today players can be sitting in a boring staff meeting, eating a sandwich at your lunch break, or standing in line at the grocery store, and bet real money playing in an online casino on their smartphone.

Online bettors use their mobile phones in large numbers:

• According to IHS Screen Digest, the mobile gambling revenue in the UK more than doubled in a year, rising from £19m in 2009 to £41m in 2010.
  
• Juniper Research is estimating that mobile online gambling will be a $48 billion industry by the year 2015, with smartphone users playing lotteries, betting, and the standard casino games like blackjack and slots.
  
• Bookmaker Paddy Power said 34% of its active customers are now accessing the service through a smartphone, and mobile revenues showing a 400% yearly increase recently.
  
• Betfair has also been prospering from mobile, taking more than £1 billion in bets from mobile devices in its latest financial year. 168,000 people placed a Betfair bet from their phones ( a 122% increase on the previous financial year) – while revenues from mobile apps and mobile sites was up 88% year-on-year. Betfair is investing heavily in mobile, launching HTML5 mobile web apps for Android, and an API for third party developers to integrate its betting exchange into their apps.

It is interesting to note the difference between iOS and Android in this field: in 2011, for the first time Apple allowed real-money gambling apps into their App Store, while Google so far seems to be taking a harder line than Apple in terms of approvals.

Finally, a potentially enormous player in the world of mobile web gaming could be state lotteries in the US. The technology is already widely used in the UK and China, where VODone's V1 app is used by 9 million mobile users to buy lottery tickets directly from the China Welfare Lottery Management Center.