EcoSmart: a survey and sector analysis of mobile phone application market for fuel consumption reduction

The spread of Smartphones and Tablets has led to the birth and the development of a new business: mobile applications on smartphones. Mobile telephony's continuous growth implies a large number of users that can access all applications of online stores. Mobile business is evolving continuously and offers applications that grant many different innovative services and at the same time mobile business offers many opportunities of development for companies and corporations because participating this new sector is becoming more and more required to improve performances and competitiveness. The purpose of this paper is a quantitative analysis of the smartphone application market through a survey of users desires and an analysis of different mobile application features and business models. The results of the survey provide a full representation of the mobile market potential, with a focus on the applications that work on fuel consumption reduction and road safety. In this framework an evaluation of the presented application EcoSmart is carried out. The application estimates user's fuel consumption and returns conclusions about his driving style (with focus on fuel consumption). The user can also review offline his paths and the geo-localised driving style data thanks to the Smartphone's GPS. The EcoSmart application replaces the OBD device and the consumption data, that can be obtained from the car engine, approximating fuel consumption just based on the dynamic of vehicle motion that is evaluated on GPS data. This procedure is simple and innovative. This study provides a demand survey for this kind of services and a sector analysis. The survey has been carried out using traditional market research methods, with a qualitative approach that is used to understand user's habits of purchase and user's desires. The second one was realised investigating the applications which are similar to EcoSmart on the Apple's Appstore and the Google Play Store, analysing their features and how they can be distributed to the users.