For each decile, I calculated the MEAN price of the Top 100 Apps over the 2 most recent weeks. Notice that for the most recent week, the MEAN price for each decile† of the Top 100 Grossing apps is more than $5. In contrast, none of the deciles for the Top 100 Paid apps had a mean of $4 or more. There isn’t much of a relationship between rank and price although there was a slight downward trend in the price of the Top Grossing apps over the most recent week: except for the blip in the 5th decile of apps ranked 41-50, the top deciles tended to have higher MEAN prices.

The same situation holds when one looks at MEDIAN price during the most recent week: each decile of the Top Grossing apps had a MEDIAN price of $3, while no decile in the Top 100 Paid apps had a MEDIAN price of $2.

Unique Apps by Category: About two weeks ago, the U.S. iTunes store crossed 90,000 apps††. Last week, the Travel and Education categories displaced Utilities, to claim spots in the Top 4 largest categories:

Found this article on Oreilly Radar

The iPhone changed all that by letting you install new apps that fundamentally changed the features of the phone in thousands of different ways.

Except, it wasn’t a new idea, even years before the iPhone was released. Symbian had offered the ability to add apps to its phones for years.

So why did the iPhone become the phone with apps and Symbian become the forgotten mobile OS?…

Simple: Symbian’s obsession with security. In what should be a huge wake up call to Steve Jobs and the increasingly totalitarian regime that he’s creating around the walled garden that is everything i (iPhone, iPad, iTunes, iPod), Symbian insisted on approving each and every app that was written for the Symbian platform.

The only problem was that its approval process was even slower than Apple’s. Whereas iPhone apps can take from a week to 2 months to be approved, a Symbian app still takes half a year before it’s approved!

Half a year is simply insane. The smartphone market is so fast moving that an app is usually out of date 6 months after it’s first released.

According to Lee Williams, Symbian’s Executive Director, this is still the case now. So not only did Symbian squander the app advantage they had when the iPhone was first launched, they continued to do nothing about the situation for a full three years while Apple cut a swathe throught the market unabated.

Sometimes you want to just bang your head against the wall at the sheer incompetence of large organizations!

Found this really interesting article on MobileMentalism :

India is now on a par with China and only the second nation in the world to achieve half a billion mobile phone subscribers – with nearly 15 million new customers being added every month.

Officials say that overall “tele-density” in the country has reached 43.5% – or 509 million subscribers.

But some areas such tiny remote north-eastern Indian state of Mizoram has now more than half the population is now using a mobile telephone.

The Mizoram state economic survey in January 2010 indicated there were 561,917 mobile phone users in the state – which has a population of about one million people – and the figures might have gone up since then. The survey said that Mizoram’s mobile phone users currently pay a total monthly bill of 50 million rupees ($1m).

All Indian mobile networks are doing roaring business in the state, where the government is the biggest employer.

Airtel is the largest network in Mizoram, with 192,000 subscribers in January 2010, followed by BSNL, Aircel, and Vodafone.

Officials say that the figures are remarkable because the state is one of the most remote in India and private industry is practically non-existent.

This seems to be the model that is replicated not only across India but also in Africa.

What does this mean for us in the mobile industry ? Basically that these people who often don’t have internet connections are going to be hungry for content. Not necessarily premium content for sure but they will want the same sort of services as others have world wide namely : search, social and info.

This represents a huge opportunity and also challenge for the present web and mobile players to offer to these new entrants what they want and to monetize all of this.. To be watched therefore.

Microsoft has announced their phone the KIN 1 and KIN 2

“My phone is my lifeline. My social glue. My next of kin.”

Microsoft explains why the KIN is special in that “it is a socially aware phone, based on Windows Phone 7, and cloud service. This combination not only makes it effortless for you to capture and share your social moments, but also have them backed up for safe keeping and easy retrieval.”

Also this device connects to Microsoft’s music store Zune and shares many of the Zune’s features such as the browser. Another up side are the 5 and 8 megapixel cameras that come with the KIN 1 and KIN 2 respectively.

Up to this point it seems that finally Microsoft has gotten some features right to make the KIN a success.

Now lets talk about what the KIN can’t do. Flash isn’t supported though which is a bit of a deception. What is quite surprising and  the real clincher though is that it can’t download apps ??!! It seems that this option is blocked. Probably because in the near future Zune music store will want to be doing that. Still this is a feeble… very feeble attempt to do what Apple has done so well namely to make a closed circuit eco-system.

The numbers represent statistics of only those countries where Google has a strong mobile advertising network, and may not have captured the full extent of the Chinese market, where Google continues to be weak.
In a separate briefing, Google’s India product head, Vinay Goel, said the number of mobile internet users has grown nearly five times in the last five years. “In fact the number of new data connections added globally this year will be higher on the mobile than on the PC,” he added.

According to him, around 25 million of the 500 million or so mobile users in India have paid data accounts and another 55-65 million use operator-provided data services. Goel said the number of Internet users on PCs in India is growing at around 50% a year and will reach 100 million by the end of 2010.

The numbers also revealed that the iPhone was losing Internet share to the Android in a big way in its home market, the US. The share of iPhone’s internet traffic dropped from 55% in November to 44% in February. During the period, the share of Android phones rose from 27% to 42%.

The last four months have seen the increasing popularity of Android phones such as Motorola’s Droid, which followed the iPhone on the popularity charts in the US.

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.

The types of applications for NFC on mobile are numerous:

■  Electronic payments – swipe your phone and make a payment without a credit card. NFC technology is already being used in Japan in more than 30,000 stores. Users can place $50 amounts, for example, into their smart phones to make payments or even use them in smart vending machines.
■  Mobile ticketing on public transportation – swipe your phone on readers placed in buses, airlines, and trains
■  Electronic keys – swipe your phone and open hotel doors or your house door
■  Smart posters – use your phone to read RFID tags on billboards and other signs to receive additional information and to let the “billboard” know you are there
Smart posters is the one that I find particularly intriguing.

Let’s imagine for a second, that you walk into your favorite bookstore where you have purchased many titless in the past. With your permission, as you walk past an internal electronic billboard, you allow the billboard to communicate with your phone. Instantly, the billboard scans your past purchases and recommends new books to you that you might enjoy reading. Or even better, a scanner reads your phone as you walk in and sends you an SMS with a customized offer to you for a discount on items you purchase that day as an opted-in frequent customer.

It’s kind of like going into your favorite pub where everyone knows your name. Of course, downsides such as privacy cannot be underestimated (but, that is why it has to be on an opt-in basis). Imagine, though, how much more effective it would be to having a customized sales experience. In clothing stores, sales people can know what you like, know your size, know if it is in-stock, and immediately bring you customized selection of new items. Out of stock items could be posted to your customer ID and custom SMS messages could be automatically sent to let you know when the item is back in-store.

For the retailer, NFC gives unprecedented real time monitoring of consumer behavior in-store that could lead to better consumer in-store experiences – more accurate preference tracking of target audiences for better merchandise selection, display and pricing, and an ideal feedback channel for more detailed research. Individually, salespeople could be more effective in providing consumers with more meaningful in-store experiences if they are familiar with their past interactions.

Will mobile phones replace in-store retail salespeople? The consensus opinion from that last post was no, but it surely will change the playing field in a substantial way. The impending mobile NFC introductions are yet another way that the retail experience of the 21st century will never be the same.

Mark Jaffe is a mobile industry and digital media executive with an active consulting business that enables mobile technology companies, as well as other technology and digital content companies, to achieve breakthrough revenue growth with sustainable profits from a foundation of sound strategic analysis and innovation. He is also a noted speaker at industry conferences, as well as a speaker and facilitator at corporate retreats and strategy workshops. Further biographical information can be found at www.markjaffe.com.  His mobile industry blog, Mobile Mandala, can be viewed at  www.mobilemandala.com