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Targeted mobile advertising firm Jumptap has released its MobileSTAT market share report for September concerning tablet and smartphone usage trends across the United States. The big surprise? The state of Maine had the highest tablet use in the U.S. in September, followed by other vacationland spots like Hawaii, New Hampshire and Virginia. Jumptap says that 93% of tablet traffic comes over Wi-Fi while the iPad controlled the sector with 75% of usage.

Other tablet traffic was Android at 20% and WebOS at 4%, in part due to the HP TouchPad fire sale during the summer. Jumptap predicts that the high usage patterns in vacation states is clearly "driven by affluent vacationers." Those looking to monetize tablet apps have a clear market for advertising revenue. Since Jumptap specializes in targeted advertising, it is a good resource for looking at mobile market trends as as whole. Check out other findings from September's MobileSTAT report below.

A new report from research firm Yankee Group shows that Android developers are facing a huge problem when it comes to piracy. Nearly 75% of Android developers surveyed said it was easy to copy an Android app and republish it. Half said it was "very easy."

This is affecting the bottom line of developers, a third of whom said the consequences of piracy cost them more than $10,000 in revenue and support costs. The report says that developers claim they get no help from Google battling Android application piracy and that the Android Market is too soft. What can Google do to help protect developers?

The Nokia developer forum has been taken offline after a breach from malicious hackers, according to the company. During Nokia's investigation they discovered that the forum database table containing developers' email addresses and in some cases personal information had been exploited by an SQL injection. The hack is bigger than Nokia had previously thought, leading to the forum's take-down.

Currently, the Nokia developer forum registers a "404 Not Found" return, meaning that Nokia system administrators have taken the entire forum off their servers. In an email to developers, Nokia stated that "the initial vulnerability was addressed immediately, we have now taken the developer community website offline as a precautionary measure, while we conduct further investigations and security assessments."

There are some undercurrents swiftly moving through developments circles that will soon become the topic everybody will be discussing. Among those topics, one significantly stands out in the mobile realm - the coming wave of HTML5 Web-based apps. The vanguard is being led by mobile games developers but the rest of ecosystem is not far behind. Facebook's so-called "Project Spartan" is the carrot that has spurred app developers but the ability to disrupt the application store model is high on developers' minds.

In talks with developers last week, the common refrain was "I do not have anything to say about Project Spartan." But app developers know that Project Spartan is coming - they are working with Facebook and soon the Web will see the benefits of their labors. The responses were not "I do not know if it is true or not, I have no idea." Rather they were "I cannot talk about that." The social games developers are leading the way of a trend that could be extremely disruptive to the native app economy.

Patents are all the rage right now. More precisely, applying for, purchasing and suing the nearest competitor over patents is causing a craze in the mobile business environment. Did Google ever actually want the Nortel patents? Or did they just bet crazy sums (like Pi, the distance from the sun, etc.) because they knew they were going to acquire Motorola and its patent portfolio anyway? Next on line are the InterDigital patents, which are supposedly more in-depth and numerous than the Nortel or Novell patents. Some say we are in serious need of patent reform because the current ecosystem has become anti-innovation and toxic.

Thomson Reuters came out with a great chart yesterday that shows the current legal battleground for mobile patents. It is interesting to note who is getting sued and who is doing the suing. For instance, as much legal hot water that Google has been in, they are technically only being sued by Oracle over Java in the mobile realm. Microsoft has multiple suits going against Barnes & Noble, Foxconn (Apple's primary factory where iOS devices are made), Motorola and Inventec. Yet, Apple takes the crown. It is being sued, is suing, or has settled suits with five different corporations.

Over the past week, there have been stirrings in the Android community about the Linux GNU General Public License (GPLv2) and whether or not original equipment manufacturers have violated the license, thus making them vulnerable to lawsuits from thousands of Linux users. The argument is that OEMs have broken the Linux license terms and so have automatically lost their rights to distribute Linux on their devices. If that were the case, it would be a big problem for Android and the OEMs since Linux is the very foundation that Android is built upon.

But the GPL situation is not so black and white. Can the Linux GPL issue be a problem for the OEMs? Certainly. Is it actually a problem right now? No, and there is no indication that it ever will be. What the argument amounts to is a miniature battle of "he said, she said" between Linux experts against intellectual property attorney and patent experts. While the IP experts make a compelling argument, the Linux and open source community brings reason to the argument.

Multiple outlets are reporting shifts in pricing in Apple's International App Stores, in order to adjust prices to reflect changes in the U.S. dollar. In some markets, prices went up, while in others, prices went down. For example, a $0.99 application in the U.S. is now £0.69, when previously, it was £0.59. Meanwhile, a Japanese app that was 115 Yen is now 85 Yen.

The analyst firms of Gartner and RBC Capital Markets have provided us with updated insights into how well the various mobile platform players are performing as of late. According to Gartner's recent report on mobile device sales in Q1 2011, smartphone market share is rapidly increasing, up 85% year-over-year to account for 23.6% of all sales this quarter.

Of particular interest to mobile developers are the trends surrounding smartphones. The two major players, iOS and Android, continue to dominate smartphone OS wars, Gartner says. Meanwhile, Windows Phone has seen only "modest sales" so far, although that may change soon thanks to the Nokia partnership.

In a separate report, RBC details how another notable industry player is doing with its latest launch - that being RIM's BlackBerry PlayBook tablet computer. Surprisingly, it appears the PlayBook is outselling Motorola's Honeycomb tablet, the Xoom.

Mobile marketing solutions provider Blue Bite and digital media company Reach Media Group (RMG) are teaming up to deploy NFC technology to over a third of RMG's 200,000 digital screens over the next six months.  In addition, Blue Bite is working with other partner networks to bring its total NFC deployment to 200,000 screens across the U.S. These digital screens, such as those found in malls, theaters, bars, clubs, gyms, airplanes, taxis, and elsewhere, allow advertisers to display video ads to millions of viewers per month. RMG, in particular, provides access to over 70 million viewers monthly.

Now those viewers will be able to learn more about any given advertiser using NFC technology. Simply put, it's one of the largest commercial rol-outs of NFC-based advertising this country has seen so far.

MasterCard has been looking into mobile payments since 2001, says James Anderson, VP, Mobile at MasterCard. It has explored the industry by offering things like PayPass-enabled credit cards, PayPass key fobs and even PayPass stickers, all of which allow consumers to pay for items with tapping, instead of swiping a card. Today, the company is delving into the use of an emerging technology called NFC, or near field communication.

In 2011, Anderson says we'll see a number of rollouts of NFC initiatives from MasterCard, including SIM-based solutions, embedded solutions and the continued deployments of NFC tags. By 2012, these efforts will have ramped up significantly.