Interesting artcile from the Economist about how the mobile internet will transform the BRICI countries. It talks about a user Ranvir Singh who suggests that buying a mobile phone was the wisest $20 he’d ever spent.

Mr Singh, a farmer in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, used to make appointments in person, in advance, to deliver fresh buffalo milk to his 40-odd neighbours. Now his customers just call when they want some.Mr Singh’s income has risen by 25%, to 7,000 rupees ($149) a month. And he hears rumours of an even more bountiful technology. He has heard that “something on mobile phones” can tell him the current market price of his wheat. Mr Singh does not know that that “something” is the internet, because, like most Indians, he has never seen or used it. But the phone in his calloused hand hints at how hundreds of millions of people in emerging markets—perhaps even billions—will one day log on.

Only 81m Indians (7% of the population) regularly use the internet. But brutal price wars mean that 507m own mobile phones. Calls cost as little as $0.006 per minute. Indian operators such as Bharti Airtel and Reliance Communications sign up 20m new subscribers a month.

In other developing countries, too, there are many more mobile phones than internet connections. In Brazil, Russia, India, China and Indonesia (the so-called BRICI countries), there are 610m regular internet users but a staggering 1.8 billion mobile-phone connections, according to the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In a report called “The Internet’s New Billion”, BCG predicts that by 2015 there will be 1.2 billion internet users in these countries—dwarfing the total in America and Japan (see chart).

These new internet users will mostly log on via their mobile phones. This tends to be cheaper and easier than any other option. In Brazil, fixed-line broadband is often prohibitively expensive; in Russia, where it can be much cheaper, it is often unavailable. In India, where infrastructure is always a headache, it is hard to get a good basic landline, let alone broadband.

Poor people seldom have personal computers. In the BRICI countries, whose combined population is more than 3 billion, there are only 440m PCs. Many people use internet cafés, but these are inaccessible to rural folk. A connection in your pocket is far more convenient.

Hordes of Indians will start using their mobiles to access the internet early next year when third-generation (3G) services, which allow subscribers to access the web, arrive. Kunal Bajaj, India director of Analysys Mason, a British consultancy, expects the take-up to be as fast—and as revolutionary—as it has been for mobile phones. “The telecoms companies have seen what happens when they drop prices. They’ve already tasted blood. The price wars will be just as aggressive,” he says.

The stakes are high. In developing countries, every 10 percentage-point increase in mobile-phone penetration yields an extra 0.81 percentage points of annual economic growth, according to a 2009 World Bank study. The mobile internet could be even more powerful. The unemployed will search for jobs online. Farmers in remote areas will find customised advice on crop planting.

The drawback of the internet is that you have to be literate to use it. That is a huge problem in India, where the literacy rate is only 60% (in China and Russia, it is over 90%). Mr Singh, the farmer, cannot read, so he cannot send text messages. He says he often needs help dialling numbers correctly, too.

according to Nielsen African-Americans use the most voice minutes – on average more than 1,300 a month. Hispanics are the next most talkative group, chatting an average of 826 minutes a month.Even Asians/Pacific Islanders, with 692 average monthly minutes, talk more than Whites, who use roughly 647 voice minutes a month. African-Americans and Hispanics also text the most. Hispanics send and receive around 767 SMS messages a month while African-Americans send and receive around 780 – significantly more than Asians/Pacific Islanders (384 texts a month) and Whites (566 texts a month). The voice and text results are compiled from one year (April 2009-March 2010) of mobile usage data gathered by the The Nielsen Company, which analyzes the cellphone bills of more than 60,000 mobile subscribers each month in the United States.

Women Have Their Say
And if you think women in the U.S. talk more than men on their cellphones, Nielsen data confirms your suspicion. On average, women talk 22 % more than men (856.3 minutes a month compared to men’s 666.7). Turns out, American women are more communicative in general on mobile devices; they text more, too, sending or receiving an average of 601 SMS messages a month compared to the 447 monthly text messages sent or received by the average American male.

Teens Rule for Texting
Not surprisingly, teens text the most, sending or receiving an amazing 2,779 SMS messages a month. In the next two age brackets, text usage falls by more than half each time, with those aged 18-24 sending or receiving 1,299 messages and those aged 25-34 exchanging an average of 592 messages. While the text usage varies greatly between those 18-24 and those 25-34, their voice usage is quite close (981 voice minutes for 18-24 and 952 minutes a month for those 25-34 years old.)

Read the full article

CNN reports that Mobile operators expect app downloads to become their biggest source of income in developed markets within three years and want to charge content providers for preferential access to their networks raising further questions about net neutrality.

Executives surveyed by the Economist Intelligence Unit forecast that revenues from voice services, which account for about 70 per cent of their income, will be overtaken by app download revenues in 2013.

Many expressed concern that consumer habits — more social networking, downloading of videos and playing of games — will require investment on their part to handle the data usage, while content providers pocket a large slice of the extra revenue. View full story at edition.cnn.com

Interesting article from Nielsen about the state of mobile Apps.  They start with the familiar “There’s an app for that” which is Apple’s catch phrase to promote the literally thousands of applications that can be downloaded to an iPhone. Whether you want to check the weather or traffic, bide time playing a game, or study a new language, there is likely a free or paid application that you can access. While Apple may be best known for mobile apps, BlackBerry, Android and other devices also have a huge range of apps available in their stores, as well as in those operated by mobile service providers.

Key Stats 21% of American wireless subscribers have a smartphone at Q4 2009, up from 19% in the previous quarter and significantly higher than the 14% at the end of 2008 14% of mobile subscribers have downloaded an app in the last 30 days Average number of apps: Smartphone: 22, Feature phone: 10 BlackBerry: 10 iPhone:37 Android: 22 Palm: 14 Windows Mobile: 13

• Games are the most downloaded – both free and paid
• Facebook, Google Maps and Weather Channel are the most popular apps across smartphones
  • iPhones: Facebook (58%), iTunes (48%), Google Maps (47%)
  • Android: Google Maps (67%), Facebook (50%), Weather Channel (38%)
  • Blackberry: Facebook (51%), Google Maps(34%), Weather Channel (28%)

• Social Networking: Facebook clearly favorite app, but MySpace is hugely popular among teens; LinkedIn attracts adults 25-44
• News/weather: Weather Channel was used by 58%; age distribution across sites was similar, save for Time Mobile and Thomson Reuters
• Shopping: Amazon and eBay lead (57% and 41%)
• Search/Map: skew male, particularly Instamapper (80/20)
• Video/Movie: skewed towards males; Imeem and Moviefone show a higher proportion of young users
• Music: iTunes, Pandora, Sirius XM appeal more to males, while Yahoo Music almost evenly split (51/49)

View the rest of the article on The state of Mobile Apps

As the world awaits the official unveiling of the highly anticipated iPhone 4G sometime later this year, talented photoshop artists are having a jolly good time dishing out concepts of what they think should the next generation iPhone should end up looking like.

While we pass on most of them with a sly grin, this particular version – a very detailed one designed by an Italian iPhone fan is a pure work of art. The concept and the detailing is sure to leave you mesmerized and for once, you might just wish Apple ends up with something like this when the new iPhone eventually arrives.

As obvious from these renderings, this “new” iPhone comes in multiple color versions and has two versions 32 GB and 64 GB. There’s a microSD card thrown in as well. The screen seems quite larger than the “original” iPhone (a tad HDish, if I may remind?). This one also gets a front-facing video calling camera and of course, the much talked about 5 megapixel camera at the rear with probable support for HD Video recording.

We love this concept and would like to know your views on the same. Leave us a comment and let us know. We leave you with a few more images of the rendering.

Original Source: techtree.com

According to The Nielsen Company, mobile Internet traffic in December 2009 was similar to total Internet use, with the largest audiences being seen for search, e-mail and social networking.

Source: http://blog.nielsen.com

Insightful presentation about the key trends in mobile marketing & advertising for 2010 from Andrew Grill