I just noticed that Opera Mini it has become the most downloaded free app in the iTunes app store just about everywhere.

This is very interesting and goes to show that people want variety and a choice. Imposing on them a solution without offering choice just goes contrary to nature. It is great to see that Apple approved Opera Mini for the iPhone in the first place and I must say I for one was surprised. Will be interesting to see if they allow other browsers like Chrome, Skyfire and others to enter.

Rabobank of the Netherlands, is a leading bank when it comes to integrating internet and mobile into their strategy. It has developed many payment systems which are now adopted by the general market.

Rabobank started with phone based banking in 1995 with an IVR banking system. The first mobile internet banking website was launched in 2001. Rabobank is now very involved in the world of mobile applications and the Rabobank is the only Dutch bank that is an actual MVNO.

In regards to mobile applications, the Rabobank discovered a strange phenomenon. Though the trend with mobile websites was to combine as much services and content as possible, mobile apps are more fragmented, focused on a specific set of functionalities. As a result, they have a banking app, but also apps for events they sponsor like the Dutch Hockey team.

As a result, their latest mobile product is more a service for mobile developers. The Rabobank has created an infrastructure for mobile in-app payments called ‘My Order’. The implementation of the product’s SDK is seamless so the developer remains in control over the user experience. With the system in place, developers will no longer charge over the phone bill and lose money to the operator. Instead they charge directly to a bank account.

This is clearly something that App developers are all looking for. It can really be a run away hit. I haven’t seen yet the app or which OSs they plan on supporting but as soon as I do I will update this entry with details.

Very informative and insightful article by Michael Mace

Although a lot of people are excited about ebooks, it’s very difficult to get hard information on how the market for them is growing. We don’t even know how many Kindles Amazon has sold, let alone more detailed specifics on the market.

So I was very happy Wednesday when the Book Industry Study Group (a publishing industry trade group) gave details from its recent survey of ebook adoption in the US. The survey was first revealed in January, but the press release was very sketchy and sometimes confusing. In its presentation at the Tools of Change conference, the BISG gave much more details on the results. My highlights from the presentation:

Ebook usage is growing fast, but it’s still small. Roughly 2% of American book buyers over age 13 are active ebook users, meaning they obtained an ebook or a reader device in the last year. About half of those were first-time ebook buyers, so the usage of ebooks has probably roughly doubled in the last year. BISG is doing multiple waves in the survey, and says it found a 25% increase in ebook usage just over the holiday season, so it was a pretty good Christmas (and Hanukah) for ebooks.

The most-used device for reading an ebook is a personal computer (47%). Amazon Kindle is number two (32%), followed by Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch (21%).

Either there’s something wrong with the numbers, or Amazon hasn’t sold quite as many Kindles as some people think. More on that below.

What does it mean?

PC leadership is no surprise. There are so many PCs in the US that even a small percentage of PC users reading ebooks will swamp everything else. BISG said that the PC share of ebook reading is declining as other devices grow, also what I would have expected. I bet that in a year (or two at the most), a majority of ebook readers will be on non-PCs.

Apple is closer to Kindle than you might expect, but… A tidbit that jumped out at me was Apple’s share of ebook usage. Kindle has gotten all the attention, but Apple has about 2/3 the share of Amazon in ebook usage without even trying. However, before we set off another round of “Apple uber alles” on the web, there are several big caveats:

–BISG didn’t report on the number of books bought per platform. Based on my experience at Palm (which had an active e-reading community), I suspect that a lot of those iPhone book readers are pretty casual, buying a few books or publications to kill time when they are bored. I believe Kindle users are probably much more active readers.

(For comparison, about 4% of the Palm OS users in the US were reading ebooks at least occasionally in 2002. That total rose to about 8-10% if you included the Bible — it was by far the most popular ebook. That amounts to about 1.5-2 million ebook users on Palm OS alone.)

–Apple and Kindle are also different demographically. After the presentation today, BISG told me that Kindle readers are older and more likely to be female compared to Apple readers. What we may be seeing is that if someone already carries an iPhone or iPod Touch, they’re less likely to invest in yet another device just to read on it. Or maybe younger people just find it easier to read on a tiny screen. Either way, I think it’s pleasant that Apple and Kindle are reaching somewhat different audiences rather than just stepping on each other.

–And of course the iPhone/iPod Touch installed base is a lot bigger than Kindle’s. So as is the case with PCs, even relatively low ebook usage on the iPhone will add up to a lot of users.

How many Kindles are really in use? As far as I can tell, Amazon hasn’t released any Kindle device sales figures, other than a quote referring to “millions” of users. Several analysts have jumped on the use of the plural as evidence that at least two million Kindles have been sold. But I think the BISG survey doesn’t support that. Here’s my math:

–About 2% of book buyers have ebooks and/or ebook devices.

–About a third of them have Kindles (that’s 0.67% of active book buyers).

–If 0.67% of book buyers in the US is two million people, then there are 300 million active book buyers in the US. That is the entire US population, including infants and people who don’t like books. I don’t know what the base of active book buyers is in the US, but my guess is it’s not over 200 million, meaning the installed base of Kindles would be about 1.3 million.

It’s tricky to play with survey results when the percentages are this small — the margins of error become very significant. But for now I think the BISG survey raises some questions, and I’m not willing to accept the two million figure for the Kindle installed base without some more rigorous evidence to support it.

Other tidbits

BISG is not going to release all of the information from the survey (that goes only to the companies that paid for it). So I took as many notes as I could during the presentation. Here’s what I captured:

Ebooks are somewhat cheaper than hardcovers
On average, an ebook costs $6.25 less than a hardcover book. This is a huge issue to the book publishing industry, which worries that ebook sales will cannibalize hardcover book sales. My comment: Of course they do, get over it. The thing publishers should be looking at is the much higher margins they make per ebook sold. I don’t know of many industries that resist moving to a higher-margin product, but publishing appears to be the grand exception. Of course, the thing worrying publishers is the decline of independent bookstores, and they’re afraid ebooks will accelerate that. But the decline of the bookstore has almost nothing to do with ebooks — it’s being driven by online sales of paper books and predation by retail chains.

Demographics
-Ebook buyers are 51% men (compared to 58% women for paper books).
-Ebook buyers are higher income than paper book buyers. Not a lot, but significantly higher income. No surprise there — most poor people can’t afford several hundred dollars for an ebook reader. Betcha they don’t buy a lot of hardcover books either.

Cannibalization
Among ebook buyers, 11% no longer buy any paper books. 8% buy mostly ebooks, and about 30% prefer to buy ebooks. So about half of ebook users prefer ebooks to paper books. That’s actually a lower percentage than I expected for something that is supposed to take over the world. But remember, half of ebook users are reading on PCs. What I really want to know is the percentage of Kindle users who prefer ebooks; that’ll tell us how satisfied Kindle users are.

Preferred device used to read ebooks
-PC: 47%
-Kindle: 32% (and rising in later waves of the survey)
-iPhone: 11%
-iPod Touch: 10% Hmmmm! iPod Touch really is a PDA.
-Other smartphones (including Blackberry) 9%
-Netbooks 9%
-Sony Reader 8%
-Barnes & Noble Nook 8% (the BISG folks noted that Nook was just starting to sell at this point; they believe some users confused Barnes & Noble ebooks with the Nook device)

Genres of ebooks
-General fiction, 31%
-Mystery 28%
-How To 25% (but #1 over Christmas)
-Science Fiction
-Biography
-Business
I don’t know where religion and travel went. I need to learn more about how this question was asked.

Mobile device users in North America pay a lot more for mobile applications than consumers in other geographic regions, a study shows.

Smartphone applications in North America have an average selling price of $1.09, while in the next closest region, Europe, the ASP is below $0.80, according to commissioned by Getjar.

For developers, the study shows that mobile advertising will play a more significant role in revenue generation in Indonesia, Brazil, India and China, where app prices are low. “For the emerging markets, it is a volumes game,” the study said.
The findings show that in the current market, North America is where the money is for mobile applications. While the number of downloads in other countries sometimes exceeds that of in North America, the amount of revenue generated in the latter is considerably more.

Google announced that its Android Market mobile applications storefront now boasts roughly 30,000 apps–just three months earlier, the store offered 16,000 apps. MobileCrunch reported the official Google total after data from analytics provider AndroLib.com calculated the present Android Market app inventory at close to 35,000. Google declined to break down the percentage of premium Android applications and free apps, but according to AndroLib, the split is about 39 percent paid and 61 percent free.

Android application development surged late last year in the wake of news Verizon Wireless would introduce its first Android smartphone, the Motorola Droid, with Android project starts increasing 94 percent between September and October according to mobile in-application analytics provider Flurry.

The global market for mobile applications is forecast to reach US$17.5 billion in the next two years, according to a new study commissioned by GetJar, claimed to be the world’s second largest app store. The study claimed the number of downloads would climb from 7 billion last year to 50 billion by 2012 – a 92 percent year-on-year increase. Apple’s App Store is the leading player, but GetJar said that the number of app stores had risen from just four before 2008 to 48 today. “We wanted to find out the real value of the industry because we felt certain segments like the iPhone were being over-hyped and so-called feature phones were being under-hyped,” GetJar founder and chief executive officer Ilja Laurs told the BBC. He questioned some of the valuations of Apple’s apps business and said that the impact of feature phones (rather than smartphones) in the apps market was being overlooked. “It is almost as if these phones don’t exist,” he said. “We know smartphones are an extremely important phenomenon, but in terms of consumer mindshare and revenue share, feature phones represent 90 percent of the global market compared to 10 percent for smartphones and data cards.”

The study found that ‘off-deck’ paid-for apps will be the biggest revenue generator by 2012, accounting for almost 50 percent of all apps revenue. By comparison, in 2009, ‘on-deck’ apps available from mobile operators accounted for over 60 percent of all apps revenue, but is forecast to fall to just under 23 percent by 2012. On a regional basis, the study forecast that apps revenues in Europe would rise from US$1.5billion in 2009 to US$8.5billion in 2012, while in North America the figure would rise from around US$2.1billion to around US$6.7billion over the same period.

Vodafone Essar ( formerly known as Hutch) had launched the Vodafone Mobile App Store in India recently. Now the operator has posted news that the App Store has crossed 10000 downloads.

The Vodafone Mobile Application store was started on 15th February, 2010 in India on the sidelines of Mobile World Congress where the company announced ultra cheap phones for India and emerging markets.The store offers over 800 apps in Entertainment, Utility, Finance, Social Networking, Games, etc. with a mix of Indian and international applications.The operator aims to regularly update the store with new applications. The application store is available to customers with GPRS enabled phones.

Regarding the price of the apps around 15% of the apps are free ones whereas the remaining are paid applications in the price range of Rs. 5 to Rs. 30.Vodafone Mobile Application store has been launched in partnership with Arvato Mobile Kumar Ramanathan, Chief Marketing Officer, Vodafone Essar said, “We are delighted to launch the Vodafone Mobile application store which combines an array of facilities for our customers including easy access to information, utilities and entertainment. The mobile applications are affordable and a significant step forward in the growth of mobile data and the future of Mobile intern

Skyfire, makers of Webby award-winning, PC-like web-browser for mobile devices, has launched the next generation of its Skyfire browser, version 1.5, for Symbian S60 3rd and 5th edition smartphones. See below their video explaining what is new about it :

Skyfire who is up against browsers like Opera mini or the newly released Firefox mobile is a mobile only browser. This has the advantage that they do only this and so are super focused on a smooth mobile experience. Of course there is the advantages of players like Firefox as they can sync between you PC and your mobile.

Whatever the case it is great to have players like Skyfire focussing directly on making the mobile internet a “turn-on” experience rather than the often “turn-off” browsing on your mobile device often is.

by Mark Jaffe   www.mobilemandala.com

There was a lot of passionate response to the post a few weeks ago “Will Mobile Phones Replace In-Store Retail Salespeople”. Even more reason that these three announcements this week caught my eye:

■  The Aberdeen Group published a report that stated in 2008, the total of digital signage market revenue stood at $766 million and is expected to reach $2.2 billion by 2014, growing at a healthy CAGR of 20%.
■  The London Daily Mirror reported according to unnamed sources that Nokia is planning to begin rolling out embedded NFC (near field communications) kits into its entire line of Symbian phones beginning Q3, 2010. The Finnish giant already has NFC in selected handsets, such as the 6216 Classic.
■  Malaysian manufacturer Fonelabs will produce two million low cost (under $100) NFC enabled phones in 2010
What do these three items have to do with retail? First, just as a refresher, Near Field Communication (NFC) is “a short-range high frequency wireless communication technology which enables the exchange of data between devices over about a 10 centimeter (around 4 inches) distance.” In other words, if you have an NFC enabled phone and opt-in, your mobile phone will be able to communicate with another proximate electronic device automatically.

Yes there is a new entrant in the app space and even in the OS space. Joining Android, iPhone, Windows, Palm’s WebOS, Blackberry, Maemo and not to forget Symbian… Samsung wades into the battle of the OSs. To get a good share in the mobile market Samsung has launched it’s own Linux based mobile OS named “Bada” which means Ocean in Korean.

Professing to be a totally open platform or OS Samsung says that it enables a richer user experience in applications on Samsung ONLY mobile devices and helps developers to create UI rich applications very easily. Samsung says that the design principles of bada aim to deliver simple, intuitive, and innovative user experiences through innovative visual design. Samsung bada includes a next generation UI framework with feature sets and design elements that facilitate leading-edge user interfaces for every bada application.