The 8 industries and professions where tablets are very popular

TabTimes is a new magazine covering tablets. It is available at www.tabtimes.com. They just made an analysis of the 8 industries and professions where tablets are very popular.

Retail and sales
This much is obvious; sales members, those in the store or out in the field, benefit from having a mobile device they can use to complete transactions or check inventory. The tablet fits that bill perfectly, with the extra screen estate (compared to an iPhone, say) allowing retailers to promote their products in the best possible way. With firms such as Square and point-of-sale provider VeriFone backing T-commerce, and with the ever increasingheavyweights possibility of near-field-communication (NFC) chips coming to tablets for device-to-device payments, it's clear the newly-coined term of 'T-commerce' is here to stay.

Education
As a sector, education is widely believed to be slow on adopting new technologies, but in truth this is more often down to restricted budgets. With that in mind, it is worth noting just how many schools and universities have already taken to tablets, with most of these either funded directly by the school or in-part by parents.

Healthcare
When you consider that touch screens and first-generation Windows tablets have been in hospitals for decades, it's not surprising that healthcare is another very prominent area when it comes to large-scale tablet deployments. TabTimes has even heard of one pharmaceutical company deploying as many as 500,000 iPads in one shot.

Legal and political
Tablets are slowly seeping into the professional lives of both lawyers and politicians. TabTimes is seeing an increasing number of deployments (or rather, often through BYOD schemes) for lawyers to use tablets in the courtroom, while politicians are also feverishly getting in on the act.

Real estate
As an industry, its linked to retail and sales, but there's no doubting that tablets can help estate agents from everything from arranging and keeping track of house visits to liaising with home owners and tempting interested buyers with interactive floor plans.

Professional sports
Calling the NFL, NBA, and pro soccer "industries" feels like a bit of an overstatement, but professional sports teams around the world have discovered that iPads and other tablets are ideal devices for containing playbooks, reviewing game footage, and more.

Aviation: Pilots, cabin crew and passengers
From the cockpit, to cabin crew and even for in-flight entertainment, tablets can now be found thousands of feet up in the air, aboard both commercial and even military aircraft. Deployments have been split between big brands like American Airlines and British Airways, to invariably smaller crews. The number of units seems to be ranging from the very small to thousands at a time.

Media and marketing
Tablets are already having a massive impact on the world of publishers. That includes both publishing for content and on-screen advertisements. For content, publishers have found a new revenue stream in the form of an iPad or Android app, which also represent another way in which to expand their coverage to the masses. What makes the news even better is that the editorial process for journalists hasn't changed much. Tablets are not just a great way for journalists to keep on top of stories using productivity-enhancing apps like Evernote or Dropbox. They are also a great way to expand coverage and reputation worldwide. Beyond the written word, tablets are also giving digital agencies the opportunity to create rich, multimedia HTML5 advertisements. While tablet-specific standards have been slow to emerge, the good news is that tablet owners appear to be more willing to interact with these ads.

Source: http://tabtimes.com/feature/deployment-strategy/2012/02/24/8-industries-and-professions-most-rapidly-impacted-tablets

Louis Rhéaume
Infocom Intelligence
louis@infocomintelligence.com
Twitter: @InfocomAnalysis