The Mobile Era is Only Getting Started

A few months ago, I took a vacation to India that I have been threatening to take for years. I expected to experience some culture shock, but what shocked me the most wasn’t the huge population, or the expected cultural differences — it was the fact that mobile phones and smart phones were absolutely everywhere.

No matter how poor the village - and some looked crazy poor - somehow everyone had a mobile phone in their hand, and all of them were using apps. It really brought home the reality that mobile phones have reached a level of use that none of us could have imagined.

Coincidentally, I had a summary of Benedict Evan’s presentation “Mobile ate the world” waiting for me in my inbox upon my return to Toronto, which completely reinforced what I had seen on my trip. I highly encourage you to have a look at it, his numbers and graphs are staggering!

Our philosophy of investing in Brightspark has always been to invest “where the market is now, not where it will be in 18 months”, and everyday we continue to see amazing deal flow in the mobile industry. There are, of course, many markets within the mobile reality — we are particularly intrigued by the millennial market, now mainstream in the workforce, and the new enterprise mobile apps aimed specifically at them. We wrote last week about how this generation of users is now completely connected to mobile 24 hours a day, and are interacting, adopting and using these apps as a second nature.

We are very excited by the tech companies we see in Canada that are all capitalizing on the massive growth of mobile, and we think that there is still huge amount of value to be created. And that is before they start offering their solution to the 1.5B people in India who will soon all have a smartphone!

We’re investing in Nudge Rewards, a powerful platform that harnesses the power of smartphones, habits and an analytics back-end to streamline communication and employee engagement in large or decentralized workforces. Accredited investors are invited to co-invest alongside us - simply sign up to Brightspark to review details of this opportunity.