Desktop usage is cratering. Here's how to get ahead on mobile

Mobile has become almost cliché among Silicon Valley companies. Everyone’s talking about their “mobile first” strategy.

Facebook now makes a majority of its revenue from mobile, up from almost nothing three years ago. And evidence about the rising importance of mobile keeps getting stronger.

Over the past year, two notable things have happened on the mobile front: U.S. adults now spend more time on their mobile devices than on their desktops and laptop computers, even when you factor out voice-calling on the phone. More recently, mobile app usage has exploded so much that this portion of mobile activity alone (not counting mobile browsing) has surpassed time spent on desktop and laptops.

That’s why MobileBeat — VentureBeat’s seventh annual event on the future of mobile — is gathering the industry’s biggest names to uncover new case studies, insights, and strategies designed to help you leverage mobile to increase profitability for your company.

NOTE: Buy your MobileBeat tickets now and save $200. The price goes up soon. Grab yours today!

It’s crucial for businesses — millions of them in the U.S., and tens of millions of them across the globe — to figure out how they can use mobile channels to reach more customers. They can do this in one of two ways. They can grow their own web site’s mobile usage directly. Or they can use mobile advertising and other marketing tools to reach users outside of their own site’s direct usage.

The great news is that the mobile infrastructure is more mature than it was just a year or two ago. A new wave of educated mobile developers and standardized mobile OS and HTML5 protocols are helping business leaders make smarter mobile choices. Performance is reaching new heights at every level of the stack: storage and cloud backends, developer tools, analytics, marketing automation software, targeting optimization, and payment platforms.

The bad news, though, is that the industry has seen a proliferation of vendors and choices of marketing technologies, which can be mind-boggling even for the smartest of business executives. That’s why MobileBeat will be hyper-focused on cutting through the hype and inviting only the most interesting and instructive cases of companies that are truly getting ahead of mobile so that we can share useful and concrete lessons with the wider audience.

We’re expecting 1,000-plus influential mobile execs to be in attendance, and we’ll deliver two days packed with high-value discussions, actionable lessons, exclusive announcements, and lots of networking.

Check out the MobileBeat website for full event details, and make sure to register soon to save $200.

We’ll be announcing a bunch of program and speaker updates over the coming weeks, so stay tuned!

Special thanks to the following industry leaders for supporting MobileBeat: Factual, Tapjoy, AppLovin and Adtile as Gold Partners; Flurry, HasOffers, Sequoia Capital, RadiumOne, Cirrus Insight and SupersonicAds as Silver Partners; Upsight, Cotap, New Relic, Globo and Splunk as Event Partners; and Adenda as Nest Partner.