Eight mobile technologies to watch

Research company Gartner has published a list of eight mobile technologies that it says will have an impact on mobile strategies and policies over the next couple of years:

1. Bluetooth 3.0,
2. User Interfaces,
3. Location Sensing,
4. 802.11n WiFi,
5. Display Technologies,
6. Mobile Web and Widgets,
7. Mobile Broadband and
8. Near Field Communication.

[Press release]

Opera ends 2008 with 17.8 million mobile users

Mobile browser company Opera has published a review of the mobile web for 2008. Its State of the Mobile Web report shows continuing growth, with 17.8 million people using Opera Mini at the end of the year. In the UK, the top 5 sites visited by Opera mobile users were google.com, facebook.com, yahoo.com, bbc.co.uk and orkut.com. The top UK social network was facebook.com with 536% growth in 2008. MySpace, incidentally, showed a 15% drop. [Press release]

Half of US mobile users ignore multimedia features

A new report by The NPD Group says 45% of American mobile phone users don't use the multimedia features on their handsets. In fact, only 20% use their mobiles as an all-in-one device for music, videos, web surfing and other activities. 21% were not sure if their handsets would play music and 23% weren't sure if their phone included GPS - although NPD calculated that 55% of phones sold from January to November 2008 had GPS technology. [Press release]

Mobile internet increasingly popular

Researchers at Nielsen say the number of British people accessing the internet via their mobile phones has increased 25% from Q2 to Q3 2008, rising from 5.8 million to 7.3 million. In contrast, PC-based internet use increased 3% from 34.3 million to 35.3 million. Google is the most popular PC-based web site, while the most popular mobile internet site is BBC News, with 1.7 million British visitors (24% of mobile internet consumers) every month. [Sources: PDF press release; Telecoms.com; TotalTele.com]

Smartphones driving increased mobile search

This is probably another of those "it's obvious when you think about it" reports. Researchers at The Kelsey Group have linked the increased purchase of 'smart' mobile devices with an increase in searches - particularly for local information - from mobiles. They say 18.9% of mobile customers in the USA now use a smartphone, with 49.2% of all respondents planning to buy a smart mobile device within the next two years. In the last six months, 17.6% of US mobile users have downloaded or looked at maps or directions (up from 10.8% in 2007), 15.6% have searched online for products or services in their local area (up from 9.8% in 2007), 14.3% have searched online products or services outside their local area (up from 6.4% in 2007), 13.7% have searched for entertainment information (up from 8.2% in 2007) and 9.6% have connected with a online social network (up from 3.4% in 2007). [Press release]

Top websites aren't coping with mobile browsing

Mobile web company Bango has just completed a survey of the top 20 websites (according to the amount of PC-based traffic, as surveyed by Nielsen Online). They found that half of the sites didn't work well on mobile phones, even though 5% of website visitors are estimated to come from mobile devices. In addition, many online businesses didn't know how much mobile traffic was hitting their PC-focussed site. [Press release; Bango blog]

Mobile search more popular than ever

The latest report from comScore M:Metrics says the number of people using mobile internet searches has grown by 30% in the UK over the last 12 months. Growth was 38% across Western Europe and 68% in the USA. 20.8 million US mobile phone customers and 4.5 million European mobile customers searched the web from their handsets in June 2008. The UK leads Europe and the USA with 9.5% of UK mobile customers using mobile search. [Press release]

US mobile web usage up almost 30% this year

Mobile solutions company Crisp Wireless has calculated that US mobile web usage is up 29.4% from Q1 (Jan-March) to Q2 (April-June) 2008. 9.45% of overall traffic is coming from search engines, with 82% of mobile search coming via Google. “Movies/Movie Listings” are the most popular search term, followed by searches for US presidential candidate Barack Obama. [Press release]

US mobile advertising trails UK; both beaten by India

Mobile social community Limbo has released a report that shows a high percentage of mobile phone users in the US, UK and India are receiving advertising messages on their mobile phone. The figures were 85% in India, 51% in the UK and 37% in the USA. Text messaging is the most common advertising format: 74% in India, 48% in the UK and 22% in the USA. The UK led mobile web advertising at 16%, while nearly 40% of Indians said they remembered hearing advertisements through the radio on their mobile phones. [Press release]

Almost 40% of mobile web traffic is to social networks

Mobile browser company Opera has released a report about the state of the mobile web, basing its findings on statistics from more than 44 million Opera-equipped devices. It says almost 40% of mobile web traffic worldwide is to social networks, with some countries hitting 60%. Over three-quarters of all users are visiting standard web sites, with WAP and .mobi sites accounting for 23% of mobile web traffic. The UK's top ten web sites viewed from a mobile device were:

• www.facebook.com
• www.google.co.uk
• www.live.com
• www.bebo.com
• www.mocospace.com
• news.bbc.co.uk
• uk.yahoo.com
• www.itsmy.com
• www.faceparty.com
• www.ebay.co.uk

Vodafone adds web browsing deal to new tariffs

Vodafone has included a so-called "unlimited" internet access deal - actually 500MB per month - as part of its new 'pay monthly' tariffs. The company says it's the first UK network to do this, although O2 created a similar deal for iPhone customers last year. The internet usage is included with all new Vodafone tariffs costing upwards of £25 per month. Existing customers can move to the tariffs if they commit to a new minimum term. [Sources: TimesOnline.co.uk, press release]

Yahoo! to launch voice search for mobile web

Internet giant Yahoo! has launched a voice-controlled search engine for mobile devices, although it's currently only available for certain BlackBerry models in the USA. It also says that Yahoo! oneSearch 2.0 will include its own predictive text service later this year, completing the words you're typing with the most common search queries. [Press release]

Opera mobile browsers now using Google

Opera's mobile web browsers - Opera Mini and Opera Mobile - are are now using Google as their default search engine, replacing a year-old deal with Yahoo! - which, in turn, had replaced an earlier deal with Google. This new agreement, which takes effect from 1st March, will apply worldwide except for Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States. [Press release]

GSMA Launches Mobile Alliance Against Child Sexual Abuse

One of the attention-grabbing stories from this week's Mobile World Congress (and mentioned in this week's podcast) is the GSM Association's launch of Mobile Alliance against Child Sexual Abuse Content. As the name suggests, it aims to block child sexual abuse content from the mobile internet. The Alliance has been founded by the GSMA (the mobile industry's international trade association), Hutchison 3G Europe, mobilkom austria, Orange FT Group, Telecom Italia, Telefonica/02, Telenor Group, TeliaSonera, T-Mobile Group, Vodafone Group and dotMobi. Members will block access to inappropriate sites, will remove inappropriate content posted on their own pages and will encourage customers to report online child sexual abuse content. [Press release]

iPhones are changing the online world (and now you can buy even more of them)

iPhone owners were responsible for nearly one out of every thousand web page views last month. ComputerWorld.com has details of the latest Net Applications quarterly browser report, which shows that 0.09% of all web page views worldwide in November were made on the Apple iPhone - a device that's been available for less than six months. Microsoft's mobile browser has just two-thirds of that... and it's been around for ten years.

Meanwhile, Wired.com reports that iPhone buyers in the UK and the USA are now able to buy five iPhones at once, as opposed to the original limit of two.

Better mobile 'browser' options required

Jupiter Research says better mobile alternatives to a conventional web browser would encourage people to use internet services while on the move. The company says mobile users want certain information available at a glance and don't need the equivalent of a desktop PC's browser most of the time. It also mentions price as another issue for mobile users. [Source: BusinessWire.com]