Two new additions to the Mozilla mobile team were also announced, Christian Sejersen and Brad Lassey, both mobile industry heavyweights. Sejersen will head a new R&D center in Copenhagen, Denmark.

This sounds like great news to me. I spend more than an hour a day on a mobile browser; I feel dirty using IE mobile but can't stand the crawling fidelity and frequent freezing of Opera Mini. I will be very excited to bring extensions into a new mobile browser from Mozilla, the first will be a del.icio.us toolbar.

For more analysis of this and other mobile news, check out coverage from mobile industry experts Russell Beattie and JkOnTheRun.

Check out the whole set of slides below, for an overview of Mobile Web startups and big company activity (e.g. Google acquiring GrandCentral in July this year):

Note: for a full-page view, go to the Slideshare page and then click "full" in the bottom-right corner.

Personally I don't read feeds in my mobile phone, although I would like to. I do download content from the Web onto my Palm PDA, for offline reading. So it makes sense to go the next step and read content online on my mobile device. Anyway Barb's readers recommended the following apps and services for mobile RSS reading, if you're interested:

- BuddyBuzz
- winksite.com
- LiteFeeds
- Bloglines mobile
- PHONifier
- iFeedYou
- FreeNews

Of course, all this data is only based on AdMob's network of advertisers, but it correlates well with the overall trends in mobile web use we have seen this year, including a recent study (PDF) by Nielsen Mobile, which saw the number of mobile Internet user in the U.S. grow from 30 million in May 2007 to 40 million in 2008.

One other interesting data point in AdMob's report is that in June, 24.3% of its ads were served to smartphones, up 22.4% since May. While Apple's iPhone is not the leading phone for mobile Internet use by far, it definitely has made a lot more people aware of the possibilities of the mobile web and encouraged them to consider buying smartphones over regular phones. For now, though, the most popular device for accessing the mobile web in the U.S. is still the Motorola RAZR.

Overall, these are encouraging numbers for anybody who is developing for the mobile web. While there used to be regular discussions if the mobile web could ever become a mainstream phenomenon, the last year has clearly shown that users are becoming increasingly interested in using the Internet on their mobile devices and as more users are shifting towards smartphones, this trend will surely continue for the foreseeable future.

At the same time, however, Compete's survey also found that almost 45% of respondents who use online banking think that using a wireless device would be 'useful' or 'very useful,' while only 12% think it would be 'not at all useful.'

This data from Compete also fits in well with a survey from WorkLight we reported about in June, which stated that 48% of consumers between the ages of 18-34 would use secure gadgets for personal banking if their bank offered it.

Judging from these data points, mobile banking can clearly look forward to robust growth, especially once consumers get more comfortable with using the Internet on their mobile devices.

Mobile Banking Has to be Easy

The poster-child for online banking in the U.S. so far is the mobile site of the Bank of America, which has close a one million active users, 2/3rds of which are under the age of 35.

One aspect of mobile banking that the Compete study doesn't take into account is that a lot of banks simply don't offer very compelling mobile sites yet. Unless the experience on a mobile device is as frictionless and simple as possible, consumers will wait to check their account status at home.

Nominate Your Mobile Startup

The Mobile 2.0 Europe presenting start-ups will be selected in 3 Categories (Seed Capital Stage, Pre Series A and Post Series A). Any start-up company with a mobile application can participate. To apply and present your company and your application, you need to fill in the online application form. The deadline for submission is June 6, 2008 at midnight CET.

5 Free Passes

To be in to win one of the 5 free tickets RWW has available, please leave a comment below noting at least one mobile web startup you have your eye on - and why. Note that we are only providing the tickets, you need to make your own way to Barcelona :-).

"...from the list, I, of course, did not see a person focusing on mobility. I'm not surprised. Mobile might not need a special focus, but it sure should be part of the discussion."

I replied in the comments that we'd love to have a mobile-focused blogger in the mix. In emails following we discussed who is blogging about the intersection of mobile and Web 2.0. Charlie himself blogs occasionally on this subject and he also pointed to Debi Jones' The Carnival of the Mobilists blog (great name!). The mobile sites I already know about are Howard Rheingold's SmartMobs and Russell Beattie's blog. I've also got Scott Rafer's Mobile Chair and Mobile Opportunity by Michael Mace (ex-Apple honcho) plugged into my Rojo.

What other mobile blogs do people recommend? As I wrote recently on ZDNet, I think mobile is the next 'revolution' cab off the ranks in the Web industry. There's no reason why we shouldn't be talking more now about how 2.0 technologies and mobile are intersecting - for example location and presence services that utilize things like RSS and social networking. What's being built now in mobile that we in Web 2.0-land should be talking about more? Who's blogging about it? Who's building it?

So instead, via the BONDI initiative, OMTP will define what interfaces developers need to access when writing apps that tap into more sensitive functions on the mobile device. BONDI will expose those handset features to the developers while also protecting the users from any fraudulent or malicious activity.

In addition, the web services that result from the BONDI initiative will incorporate the various open and proprietary work currently in progress in this area of mobile development so as not to cause more fragmentation.

As today's mobile phones become more like mini-computers, the need for standards and security is paramount. The members of OMTP agree. Having standards will "encourage more developers to create unique, exciting applications for mobile web 2.0," says Arnd Gallmann SVP Terminal Technology at T-Mobile.

We couldn't agree more and are now eagerly awaiting the plethora of services that are sure to result from this move.

The new delicious mobile site has a simple interface for seeing your bookmarks and the most popular bookmarks system wide for the day, but it's otherwise extremely limited in functionality.

Browsing with no way to bookmark is like nearly wasted time online, and nowhere is that as true as in a mobile browser. Perhaps Yahoo! should team up with Opera Mini to offer bookmark submission in the browser.

With the new mobile delicious you can see recent bookmarks with a certain tag, but not popular ones. You cannot see who bookmarked a URL, their history, etc. You can put together multiple tags, which is nice, so you can find cooking blogs at m.delicous.com/tag/cooking+blog.

For now we'll stick with our existing solution, pulling the RSS feed of our items marked "to read" into Mobile Netvibes.

Today, Google has announced that the same options are coming to mobile search. Now, mobile users will have the same options on-the-go as they do when using Google search from their personal computer.

As Google software engineer Reza Ziaei wrote this evening on the Google Mobile blog, "You can do this simply by searching for the name of the product. Then, on the search results page, use 'Options' to filter by 'Forums' and refine further by choosing 'Past week.' See the screenshots below for a sample query. Try these and other Search Options yourself by simply doing a mobile search on google.com and selecting Options."

This announcement comes on the heels of Google's announcement of enhanced mobile local search options and results last week.

As we wrote earlier today though, consumers are not happy with how the mobile web is performing. Turning on mobile themes by default could be one small step towards solving that problem in the large territory that is WordPress.

Earlier this month WordPress announced that users can now more easily publish links to their new blog posts out into the world's defacto light-weight RSS reader, Twitter.

From the slow emergence of mobile reading and publishing to the unwillingness of carrierers to solve bandwidth problems, it's clear that the mobile web is still in its very early stages. For now, little things like this make a very big difference.

In other mobile stats, the Nielsen Company today released the findings of a study on the mobile media and cross media behavior of U.S. "tweens" (ages 8-12). It found that an estimated 35% of tweens own a mobile phone. Fellow RWW author Josh Catone noted that he first got a mobile phone at age 17. I won't reveal when I got my first mobile phone, but it's fair to say that when I was a teen mobile phones resembled bricks!

So we ask again: is the Mobile Web finally set to take off? You betcha! Although if last week's poll is anything to go by, there is still a long way to go before a majority of people (in the western world at least) use their mobile phones to surf the Web - our poll indicated that over 40% rarely or never use the Mobile Web. That will surely change over the next year or so, but it's still relatively early in that adoption curve.

VMware, a company known for their virtualization software for the desktop and datacenter, recently announced their plans to bring that software to mobile phones through their new VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP). The software is built on technology the company acquired from Trango Virtual Processors just last month. With this new technology, you would no longer have to carry both a work phone and a personal phone. Instead, your I.T. department could just deploy the corporate phone's profile to your personal device where it would then run in a virtualized space.

For mobile phone users, the benefits of mobile phone virtualization mean they can run multiple profiles on one device. It also means that an entire mobile phone's persona - including applications, photos, videos, music, email, etc. - can be easily ported from one device to the next.

For manufacturers, virtualization means they can deploy their software to a wide variety of phones without having to worry about the underlying hardware. It would also allow handset vendors to run their "trusted services" like DRM, authentication, and billing in tamper-proof virtualized environments.

According to Monica Basso, research vice president, at Gartner, virtualization for mobile devices is the next big thing. "We predict that by 2012, more than 50% of new smart phones shipped will be virtualized," she says.

Of course the unanswered question here is the one everyone wants to know: will VMware's MVP run as an iPhone app?

Firefox Mobile looks to be coming to a Windows Mobile device near you very soon. With a reported Acid3 Test score of 88/100, the mobile web browser looks nearly complete in the screenshots that have surfaced. The address bar is reminiscent of Safari on the iPhone. However, it takes a visual cue from Firefox 3 with the addition of website favicons. Screenshots also show a really unique way for web surfers to visualize what tabs are open in Firefox Mobile. Mozilla may be foregoing traditional 'forward', 'stop', and 'back' buttons located in the address bar. Instead, the screenshots show on-page text boxes that indicate these actions.

Worth the Wait?

Firefox Mobile is shaping up to be a real knock out. We can't wait until we can give you a hands-on review of the mobile browser. It will be interesting to see how Firefox Mobile can hold up against established game players like Pocket Internet Explorer, Safari Mobile, Opera Mobile, and Skyfire. We'll be sure to keep you posted as more details hit the web. Are you looking forward to Firefox Mobile? What features and functionality do you hope Mozilla doesn't leave out in the future?

heysan

heysan describes itself as a "mobile meebo" - it's a meta IM service for mobile phones. It is mobile browser based and works on the iPhone. The service is free and features include one single buddy list and a chat conversation view. They launched in April 07, a product of the YCombinator program.

Taptu

See our full review of this product, a new type of mobile search.

Mippin

Mippin connects mobile users to their favorite web content, which for mobile means the freshest content optimized for small screens. It has a search function (although a search for "mobile2.0" didn't discover any R/WW posts), and if you find a good story you can share it - via services like Twitter. It also allows you to publish content.

Update: Prashant Agarwal from Mippin comments: "hey richard, I searched for "Mobile2.0" when I did my demo. But if you search for "Mobile 2.0" you guys come up. Stupid, I know, we're working on it."

Mobile Analytics

MobileResearch is a mobile data company; it sells data feeds, does phone testing, etc. They've done a lot of work on device targeting. The Mobile Analytics product is a stats service for Mobile Web, launching in January. Currently the service is in private beta testing.