Or,  so it seemed at yesterday's Digiday: Apps conference in New York. From cleaning oil slick animals to joining MLB fan community to connecting with favorite tv shows, marketers learned the ins and outs of creating mobile applications to meet their business needs.

In the after-conference cocktail hour conversations, though, it seemed that there were still skeptics: belief that smartphones users are a minority, that mobile apps are potentially just "fads" and most importantly, that they lacked tangible ROIs.

It's unfortunate because smartphone usage is growing significantly and offers savvy marketers a platform for engaging current and potential customers.

There are roughly 29 million smartphone owners in the U.S. and they are not a monolithic group as GravityTank, who presented at the end of the day, illuminated with their ethnographic and quantitative research on mobile app users.  Their results should ease marketers' minds about mobile apps' relevance, audience size and up-side opportunity.  Consider:

• Mobile app users are engaged with their downloaded apps: 40% of total daily phone interaction is spent on their mobile apps -- roughly 55 minutes every day.
• More than a third (35%) feel that mobile apps have changed their lives
• More than half (53%) report that mobile apps have helped them, making their lives easier in some way
• They downloaded an average of 21 apps of which seven were used on a daily basis
• Of those seven used on a daily basis, five of them were paid for vs free. 
• Significant majorities of respondents are interested or extremely interested in apps from brands -- e.g., retailers, financial institutions, airlines, hotels
• Not surprisingly, given the time they spend on their apps, only 7% of them believe mobile apps are "fads"

In addition, GravityTank shared their segmentation of app-phone users who look and act differently:

• Recent converts: Recent converts are new smartphone users who experiment with apps. They think apps are fun and nice to have on a phone, but they don’t see apps as game-changers.
• Life Optimizers: Optimizers see their phones as digital extensions of their brains. They use them to manage their busy lives and to improve their ability to make the most out of the opportunities each day presents.
• Constantly Entertained: The constantly entertained use their phones primarily for social and media purposes. They are younger, predominately male, and seem to have a deep-rooted fear of boredom.

Of these three segments, the Life Optimizers and Constantly Entertained offer an existing sizable audience for marketers to engage -- representing 73%-80% of Blackberry/Windows and iPhone/G1 users, respectively.  Demographically, they are a sweet-spot for most marketers.

While Kevin Nakano, of WhitePages, Inc. had not seen GravityTank's research, his firm, nevertheless, understood the upside potential of launching a mobile app.  In the year since it's launch first on iPhone and then Android and Blackberry, WhitePages, Inc. their free mobile app has generated 57cents per user in ad revenue with a ROI of 10 cents per user.  Revenues from their more recently launched premium paid mobile app will only add positively to the company's financial statement.

Armed with these kind of insights, marketers should explore how mobile applications can support their business objectives. It's not a fad and it's not going away in the near future.  Rather, more and more consumers are going to transition to app accessible phones, relying on them to assist and entertain them on a daily basis.  Smart marketers will be right there with them.