NFC » mobilegroove

The positive response to my earlier recap of barcode milestones and reprint of my exclusive interview with Scanbuy, a major player in the space,

This week the Carnival of the Mobilists – the weekly line-up of the best blogs and bloggers on all things mobile – comes to us via Andy Favell over at MobiThinking, a valuable resource with a good selection of mobile advertising stats, reports and white papers. Between Andy's outreach for old and new Mobilists to submit posts –and my eager tweets (@COTMobilists) encouraging more people to get involved – the COM attracted a whopping 40+ submissions(!). Thanks to Andy for his extra attention to collecting and ranking posts leaving us with the 10+ posts that made the grade.

10 MILLION PEOPLE IN BRITAIN GET ONLINE ON THEIR MOBILE PHONES, or 20 percent of those with handsets, says some new research from Nielsen. The firm also says that smartphone ownership increased by more than 10 percent over the last three months, with 6.2 million of the devices now in use in the UK

TOUCHSCREEN DEVICE SALES IN THE U.S. ROSE 159 PERCENT OVER THE PAST YEAR, says Comscore, with the growth outpacing that of smartphone sales, which rose “just” 63 percent. The company says there were about 23.8 million touchscreen devices in use in the US at the end of August, and about 33.8 million smartphones.

SMARTPHONES ACCOUNTED FOR ALMOST THREE TIMES more usage than their relative market share, according to AdMob's April 2009 Mobile Metrics Report.The report compared usage of mobile websites to usage of HTML sites on mobile devices and found the relative usage of both to be highest on Apple and Android devices. The iPhone's OS had 8 percent of the smartphone market, yet generated 43 percent of mobile web requests and 65 percent of HTML usage. Ad requests from applications are said to have contributed to this heavy usage. Source The bottom line: As illustrated numerous times within this section, the data dominance and superior browsing experience allowed by smartphones is undeniable. Making mobile Web user experience smooth, easy, and compelling - as these handsets often do - is shown to consistently drive mobile data traffic. That many consumers probably can't tell and don't care about the difference between mobile websites and HTML sites is also testament to technical developments. *** GARTNER SAYS THE NUMBER OF MOBILE PAYMENT users will increase by 70 percent this year. Its report claims that 73.4 million users of mpayment in 2009 would represent a leap of 70.4 percent from 2008. By 2012, it says mobile payment will reach more than 190 million, more than 3 percent of total mobile users worldwide, attaining a level at which it will be considered "mainstream." Gartner defines a mobile payment as paying for a product or service using mobile technology such as a short message service (SMS), Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), and Near Field Communication (NFC). It includes transactions that use cash, bank accounts or debit and credit cards, as well as non-carrier stored value accounts, such as travel cards, gift cards or PayPal. It does not include transactions that use mobile operators' billing systems, such as purchase of mobile content or telebanking by mobile to the service center via an interactive voice response (IVR) system. Source The bottom line: Although the definition of mobile payment is ambiguous here, these figures demonstrate that the mass market is slowly growing confident in using their mobile to pay for and transfer money. Much effort has been made to foster consumer confidence in the micropayment mobile payment space, and the adoption of mobile banking technologies still varies drastically from region to region. There are regulatory and security challenges to overcome, particularly with the emergence of NFC technologies, but these figures give strong reason for hope. *** SPEECH APPLICATIONS ARE TO TRIPLE by 2014 according to a new Datamonitor report. The report claims that as we get used to using mobile computing devices in 'hands-busy', 'eyes-busy' environments, speech recognition technologies are expected to gain considerable traction. The global market for advanced