At the end of 2010, for the first time ever, smartphones outsold PCs. Mobile device adoption rates continue to rise rapidly around the world. A recent forecast by Cisco found that global mobile data traffic more than doubled last year, and by the end of 2012, the number of mobile devices in use will outnumber the world's population. In the United States, which ranks third in the number of mobile subscribers behind China and India, nearly 98 million people, or 40 percent of mobile subscribers, owned smartphones in the last quarter of 2011, according to comScore. It's in this burgeoning mobile landscape that colleges and universities are either forging ahead with mobile strategies or grappling with where to begin. According to the December 2011 report "Mobile IT in Higher Education" by the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research, institutions "expect mobile computing to become an integral part of higher education". In fact, 90 percent of survey respondents expect spending on mobile initiatives to increase during the next three years. But the many institutions that have entered the mobile space with native applications, mobile-optimized websites, or both are providing services and constantly updated information to students, parents, alumni, staff, and community members in hopes of engaging them in new ways. From course information to the number of computers available in the library, institutions are experimenting with the information they can best supply on their mobile platforms. Meanwhile, mobile communication offers higher education a seemingly limitless number of marketing and promotional avenues.