The bottom line: Mobile data revenues continue to grow, and are a bright spot for mobile operators among sinking voice spending. It’s also notable that given the U.S. recession, mobile data spending grew so strongly.

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NOKIA’S OVI STORE IS SEEING STRONG GROWTH, the company says, citing a 50 percent increase in downloads in August over July, with user registrations up 250 percent in the month. Nokia says it’s approving about 500 pieces of content per week for the store, including apps, games and content like ringtones. 27 operators in 8 countries currently support direct billing for the Ovi store, but Nokia says that the feature will be available in more than 20 countries by the end of Q1. Source

The bottom line: It’s nice to see the download figures rise, but without a breakdown of what kind of content users are grabbing – or how much they’re paying for it – it’s difficult to assess this market from an operator or content provider perspective. What are users downloading? And who’s making money in the Ovi Store?

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PRINT PUBLISHERS SEE MOBILE PLAYING AN INCREASINGLY IMPORTANT ROLE IN THEIR ONLINE PLANS, says a new survey from the Audit Bureau of Circulation, the group that audits U.S. publishers’ subscriber figures. A third of those surveyed see mobile having a significant impact on their revenues within three years, and 70 percent say they’re paying more attention to mobile this year than last. 33 percent think they’ve got a good plan in place for the mobile market as well.

Also, 17 percent of those surveyed said they already had a smartphone app for their publication, and a further 56 percent plan to develop one in the next 24 months. Source

The bottom line: Print publishers are struggling, and it certainly looks like they are approaching mobile with much more determination than they initially did the web. They’re looking for new sources of revenue, and have big hopes for new platforms. But mobile in and of itself is not a business model for them, they’ve still got to figure out how to create value and generate revenues from it.

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NEWS AND REFERENCE APPS GET THE MOST WEEKLY USE AND STAY ON IPHONE USERS’ DEVICES THE LONGEST, says a report from mobile apps analytics provider Flurry. The company looked at the weekly usage rates and retention rates for several different types of apps, in an attempt to assess the level of user loyalty. It explains that the news and reference apps feature the most regularly updated content, hence their high usage and continued attraction.

It also found that “entertainment” apps, which it also calls gimmick apps (think iFart, the Zippo lighter app), have the lowest retention rate, highlighting how users download them, use them a few times, then delete them. It also broke out a couple of other sectors of usage patterns: one including apps like e-books, which get used intensely over a short period of time, and another holding navigation and productivity apps, which don’t get used as often, but are retained on devices for a long time. Source

The bottom line: These are some interesting figures that deliver some insight into how users – subconsciously, perhaps – view and utilize apps.

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THE NUMBER OF U.S. SMARTPHONE USERS ON SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES HAS TRIPLED in the past year, says new research from Nielsen. The company says there were 18.3 million unique users of mobile social networking sites on smartphones in July, up from 6.4 million in 2008. Facebook was the most popular site, getting twice as many users as the nearest rival, MySpace. Source

The bottom line: This follows last week’s data points that told a similar story and predicted even more growth for mobile social networking in the coming years. The mobile is an inherently social device, so expect to see ever-higher numbers.

When Peggy recounted the main points of her recent – and extremely pragmatic –mobile advertising white paper and hinted that the next step might be to mobilize MSG, we decided the timing was right to provide publishers with a how-to guide to mobilizing their content using MSG as a real-life example.

And what better time that the week of Mobile World Congress (MWC), an event that showcases the best in the mobile space and celebrates an astounding 4 billion connections. According to Wireless Intelligence, the GSMA’s market intelligence unit, this milestone underscores the continued strong growth of the mobile industry and puts the global market on the path to reach a staggering 6 billion connections by 2013.

In addition to this impressive subscriber growth, we’re also seeing a similar upswing in mobile Internet usage. In July 2008 a comScore report counted nearly 13 million mobile internet users in the U.K. alone - translating to approximately 25 percent of the U.K. population. Though this number is less than the 70 percent of the U.K. population using the PC internet, it represents a seismic shift in the absolute number of mobile Internet users compared with 2007.

This increase in interest, coupled with the impact of the iPhone and the introduction of cheaper data tariffs and new off-portal mobile services, positions the mobile Internet for phenomemal growth.

What is the impact on publishers?

While they could continue to focus on the PC Internet rather than tackle the task of creating a mobile site (reasoning that the emerging nature of the mobile market, a set of different technologies and standards, unknown potential set-up costs and lack of certifiable return on investment make this a smart business move), we strongly advise against this inertia.

Waiting is a mistake for two reasons. First, mobile users are already exploring the so-called PC Internet, turning up the pressure on publishers to deliver a good experience. Second, they would be foolish not to take advantage of the opportunity to increase incremental revenue by targeting new users with a mobile-optimized site.

Of course, websites designed for viewing on PCs don’t always render particularly well on tiny mobile phone screens. For this reason, many publishers are pursuing a strategy that requires them to develop a second site, specifically optimized for mobile screens, thus providing the mobile traffic that arrives on their PC websites with a mobile-optimized destination.

It’s too early to tell whether users with smartphones or touchscreen devices (iPhone, G1 and BlackBerry, for example), who can view full PC websites, actually prefer the full PC experience to accessing a mobile-optimized website. But even if they are, these users still do not represent the mass market. As AdMob shows in its monthly metrics report, the vast majority of mobile phone users own low-end and mid-range devices, a large sector that can indeed benefit from being able to view mobile-optimized versions of the websites they know and love from the PC.

To be clear, not all websites require a mobile version to reach their audience. Sites such as Twitter, some text based blogs, and some listings websites for example make the jump from PC to mobile quite easily. However, at the end of the day, there is no easy way to tell whether a specific PC site will make for great viewing (as is) on a mobile phone. This depends on a variety of factors including the choice of mobile browser, the nature of the website content, the actual handset capabilities and latency (amount of data transferred and bandwidth available), each playing a role in determining how well a PC website converts to mobile viewing.

This is where Mippin and other similar services come in. Mippin Mobilizer enables publishers and content owners to build a mobile site for free and customize it in line with the PC equivalent website design. Mippin Mobilizer also provides the ability to promote the site for free, by either creating a custom mobile URL so that traffic can be redirected to the mobile version of the site, or by taking readers through to a PC-based mobile site emulator (more on this in the Mobilizer “how to” section further down in this column).

Finally, Mippin enables publishers to monetize their mobile-optimized destinations through mobile advertising, returning 100 percent of the revenue generated around publishers content in many instances.

Granted Mippin is not the only company offering this sort of service – FeedMate, Wapple, mobiSiteGalore, Mofuse and Wordpress plugins also go a long way toward helping publishers optimize their content for mobile. However, Mippin goes one decisive step further, incorporating sites mobilized with Mippin into the Mippin mobile portal, a top destination that generates significant traffic. This way the burden isn’t entirely on the publisher to boost visibility or discoverability through investing in SEO or paid search schemes; they benefit from being part of a portal – and an ecosystem — that generates traffic for all its members.

Other providers – such as Mofuse – also allow publishers a place on their mobile portal. With Mippin, however, the added emphasis is on discovery (through the use of tools and technologies) to further match publisher content to the right user.

To this end Mippin has purposely drawn from a  range of web 2.0 principles and added new features including portal auto-personalization, content recommendation and social likeness features (in the form of a “similarity meter” identifying common interests, or lack of) to connect users to relevant publisher content based on preferences and passions. It’s a virtuous cycle: Publishers can connect with new readers and users get the content they want most.

Whether a publisher chooses to use Mippin Mobilizer depends on their business case and objectives. But it’s important to know what is involved if you want to mobilize your content.

At Peggy’s invitation we have mobilized MSearchGroove and documented the steps in this process in a simple how-to guide.

There are four quick steps to launching PC content as a live mobile site: Mobilize, Customize, Publicize and Monetize.

The first step was to re-render content from the msearchgroove.com website. This needs to be in the form of a feed, in an RSS or Atom based format.

The msearchgroove.com feed here is mobilized in a few seconds, where it appears in the emulator on the same page. This takes us through to the second step, customizing the new mobile version with branding that reflects the website. As you can see, the process is pretty straightforward.

It’s easy to spend time trying out design combinations with the adjacent emulator; you might want an individual look for your mobile site, or a design that resembles your website. Either way the colour palette provides a good selection of colours, and can additionally handle any hex or colour value that is currently available. The msearchgroove.com site was completed in a few minutes, with the logo uploaded and colours reflecting the website easy to find and replicate.

Once the msearchgroove.com site was branded, the next step was to get the word out to existing and potential readers. To assist publishers Mippin Mobilizer offers a vriety of tools and feaures such as reader auto-redirection (directing readers to the new mobile-optimzed destination). Mippin Mobilzer also helps publishers promote the new site from their PC website by providing a “Make It Mobile” button (which publishers can add to their site or blog) and the option to create their own mobile URL.

In this case, we chose www.mippin.com/msearchgroove. (If you wish to go one further and automatically redirect PC traffic to a mobile site you must change the DNS settings for the website. Mippin provides step-by-step Information explaining this procedure here.

As I noted, publishes have the option of embedding the “Make It Mobile” button by selecting the relevant blogger platform (Mippin Mobilizer is currently integrated with Blogger & Typepad), or using the html code generated. Embedding this also links the msearchgroove.com website to a PC emulator demonstration of the mobile site. We recommend this highly as it also provides publishers access to QR codes (or 2D-barcodes), which can help users navigate quickly and simply to the new site by just capturing the QR code with their cameraphone.

Another way to get the word out and generate interest in the mobile-optimized website is through tags. With Mippin Mobilizer it’s possible to assign a selection of predefined tags to the mobile site, thus improving the number of times the site is returned within Mippin mobile portal site search results.

It’s possible to create an infinite amount of tags, but it’s important to note that Mippin’s portal search algorithms also rank search results on that basis of other factors such as relevancy (determined by tracking the sites a user has visited previous) and user recommendations (similar sites and content recommended by like-minded peers).

Almost there! The last step is all about monetizing the traffic you get, whether that traffic is direct to consumer (users found you on their own) or acquired through a presence on the Mippin mobile portal. To enable monetization, Mippin authorizes the site feed and provides the publisher with a  validation key. In this example, the process requires the publishers to submit a recent blog post to verify that the real owner of the site authorizes the destination to deliver mobile ads.

Once authorized, advertising from AdMob will be inserted in to the site at the top or bottom of the pages, though not within stories. (Note: Mippin doesn’t take a revenue share if the publisher uses their own AdMob ID. Click here for more details.)

And that’s it – the msearchgroove.com mobile site is live! It’s now optimized for any mobile traffic arriving on the site and can be viewed at www.mippin.com/msearchgroove!

Peggy adds: Hope you enjoy the MSG mobile-optimized site. MSG will also be a test case for a cool new product Mippin is slated to launch a little later on this year, so please check back. MSG will also  road test a variety of solutions for a new how-to white paper on mobile publishing, so watch this space.