It has been a while since we checked in on the mobile or “portable” platforms as we like to call them. There have been a number of advances in the first quarter of 2010. First the numbers. Consumer’s worldwide purchased 1.21 billion mobile phones in the last 12 months. Google launched the Nexus One, Android growth continues to climb, Barnes and Noble shipped the Nook, and Apple introduced the Ipad and the Iphone 3GS – others to follow.

New smartphones are driving the increased use in mobile. Google CEO Eric Schmidt reports that their partners are selling about 60,000 Android based phones each day. At that rate the open source operating system is putting pressure on the big guys, Blackberry, Apple and Palm. In fact, Flurry estimates when Apple launched the Iphone, 1 million devices were sold in the first 74 day on the market. Motorola Droid shipped more 1.05 million devices during the same time span. Google’s Nexus One sales haven’t been so robust, selling only an estimated 135k phones in 74 days.

Apps on smartphones have grown into a powerful industry. GetJar, a neutral app store is predicting mobile apps should grow to a mind numbing $17.5 billion with the next three years. To put that into perspective, the value of the apps sold would be greater than the value of CD’s sold in 2012, estimated $13.83 billion. A growing number of Americans are using those apps to remain updated on what is going on in the world.

A recent Pew Internet Study, “Understanding the Participatory News Consumer” shows that a third of mobile users are portable news viewers. Some 80% of American adults have cell phones today, and 37% of them go online from their phones. The impact of this new mobile technology on news gathering is unmistakable. One quarter (26%) of all Americans say they get some form of news via cell phone today—that amounts to 33% of cell phone owners.

These wireless news consumers get the following types of news on their phones: Social networking is creating it’s own information stream. The study also says 51% of social users keep up with what is going on by simply having online conversations with their friends and followers.

In fact, for the first time ever Facebook has dethroned Google as the most visited website in America gathering more than 7% of the total web visits in America. Combined the two represent just over 14% of all daily web visits. For Facebook’s 400 million worldwide users, that is a 185% increase in the last year. So where is all of this going? Google thinks it’s a shift in how people will access the web in the future.

Vic Gundotra, Google’s vice president of engineering for mobile applications, told investors this week “the company has bet big on mobile”. CEO Eric Schmidt calls Google “mobile first” company, interesting coming from the world leader in search. Maybe it is because more than 10% of all searches are initiated from a mobile phone, when people are away from their desks, usually at lunch, according to web analysts Thomas Weisel Partners.

Smartphones are driving more and more people to the web, meaning mobile clicks is beginning to have an impact on the overall growth of paid clicks and online ad revenue. Now the mobile business model begins to breakthrough.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 at 4:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.