Nearly three-quarters (72 percent) of small companies indicated they use mobile apps in their day-to-day business operations, according to the AT&T Small Business Technology Poll. Furthermore, 38 percent of these respondents said that either they couldn't survive or it would be a major challenge to survive without these apps.
The same poll reports that 41 percent of small businesses have a Facebook page for their business, showing a 52 percent increase from last year.
Four in 10 small businesses say their employees use wireless devices to work away from the office, registering a 66 percent growth over the past two years. Around 33 percent of small businesses are using cloud-based or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions, while another one-third acknowledged they do not know what these technologies are all about, according to the AT&T survey.
While small businesses use mobile apps for their business, the driving force behind this adoption is time savings, increased productivity and reduction of costs. GPS/navigation and mapping mobile apps are the most popular, with nearly half of the respondents saying they use them for their small business.
Recently, AT&T announced it will be setting caps on data usage for its DSL and U-verse broadband services. DSL customers who exceed a monthly limit of 150 gigabytes of data in three separate months will be charged $10 for each additional 50 gigabytes they use, while U-verse subscribers will have a monthly limit of 250 gigabytes.