HispanicBusiness

Not just text and email: The apps revolution

•Nearly 70 percent of the Gen Y respondents said mobile applications are important to their daily lives. •More than half said they mainly use mobile applications for games and entertainment. •Yet one in four (27 percent) mainly use mobile applications for work.

How many apps do you need? Vendors advertise thousands of applications in their app stores, but are those apps being used? Of all the apps being downloaded daily, a surprisingly low number are used on a regular basis.

•The majority of Gen Y respondents (70 percent) report using fewer than 10 smartphone apps regularly. •Only one in four (24 percent) respondents said they use 10 to 25 apps regularly

Online friendship versus in-person: The online community knows no bounds of geography or time zones

•Forty percent spend more time visiting online with friends than socializing in person. •Two-thirds of respondents said they spend an equal amount of time, or more, socializing online with friends than they do in person. •But there's a gender difference: 38 percent of men worldwide spend more time in-person with friends than online, versus 29 percent of women.

Who are you really? Online and real-world identities aren't the same.
Connecting online creates opportunities to stretch everyday boundaries and try out a new persona -- but on the flip side, it can lay the foundation for deception. How much can you trust what you read online?

•Four of five (81 percent) respondents believe that people have different online and offline identities. •Over a third of the respondents felt that most people have very different online versus offline identities. •When asked about themselves, only 44 percent said their online identity was the same as their real-world "offline" identity.

Will smartphones replace laptops in the workplace?
In many parts of the world, smartphones now rival laptops as the single most desired device by 18 to 30 year-olds. It is seen as the most versatile and the most compact.

•If they had to choose only one device, a third of the respondents preferred a smartphone, while slightly more than a third favored laptops. •Smartphones have surpassed desktop computers as the preferred workplace device from a global perspective. •Smartphones were rated twice as popular as a desktop PC and three times as popular as a tablet.

For the "always-connected" generation, a single mobile device will do, whether it is a personal device or a company-owned device, which creates challenges for the IT managers who must safeguard company assets and information.

•While two out of five said their company's policy forbids them to use company-issued devices for non-work activities, nearly three out of four (71 percent) said they don't always obey those policies. •Two-thirds (66 percent) feel that "employers should not track employees' online activities -- it's none of their business." •IT professionals know that many employees don't follow the rules, but they don't understand how prevalent it is: Over half of IT professionals globally thought their employees obey the policy on not using work devices for personal use.