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.

Overall, 21 percent of the survey's 15,000 respondents spent an hour or more playing mobile games each day. But the report's most surprising finding may be that 27 of percent of women over 30 spend three hours or more per day playing mobile games - double the rate for both men and females ages 12 to 29.

"The fact that people are gaming on their mobile phones at home, often sitting a few feet away from their controller, shows that mobile is capable of grabbing and holding their interest. This data makes it clear that mobile is a viable alternative to console and PC gaming," Justin Siegel, CEO of MocoSpace, said in a statement.

The study also shows mobile games are more popular than console games with casual gamers who play games less than three hours per day.

Earlier data showed that mobile payments on Thanksgiving Day and up until 11am PT on Black Friday had increased 516% compared to 2010. PayPal predicted that more people would be engaging in shopping from their mobile devices or tablets, which is otherwise known as "couch commerce."

Are you shopping from your mobile device or tablet? Tell us about it in the comments below.

First, the new mobile front end will be deployed across all the Wikipedia sister sites and projects, right now it's just Wikipedia that has a specially formatted mobile interface. Next, this new front end will support forthcoming mobile developments like mobile editing, image uploading from mobile devices and offline support for Wikipedia on your phone. Those sound like great directions for Wikipedia mobile to go. Mobile has long felt like a second class citizen, but perhaps that will change soon.

A Wikipedia that supports mobile editing and image uploading will be a much more inclusive and real-time Wikipedia in the future.

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

According to the report, the mobile Web in Africa continued to see triple digit growth, with page views increasing by 182% over last year, unique users by 124% and data transferred by 160%.

"The mobile Web is critical in the region where mobile phone penetration is substantially higher than PC penetration. The widespread availability of mobile phones means the mobile Web can reach tens of millions more than the wired Web," says Opera co-founder Jon von Tetzchner in the report.

Opera has a stake in the mobile Web with its mobile browsers, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini, which can speed up Web browsing through data compression and server-side caching, especially on feature phones and less CPU-intensive smartphones. Opera Mini had more than 59 million users in June, an increase of nearly 125% from over a year ago.

While we didn't see Opera on the iPhone as a home run, the browser has been a much bigger success on feature phones. In Africa, Opera saw wide usage on Nokia, and the brand remains the most popular, followed by Sony Ericsson, Samsung and LG.

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.

Based on data from StatCounter for October 2010, Asia and Africa have the highest share of mobile web usage. And as Royal Pingdom quips, "It is a bit ironic that mobile web usage, is relatively speaking, lower in Europe and North America than in much of Asia and Africa. At least when you consider all the attention that Android, iPhone, and smart-phones in general are getting over here."

The data in this report gives only averages, and obviously some countries within these regions have much higher rates than others. There are several countries in Africa, for example, that have mobile web usage below 10%. But many others have mobile web usage in excess of 20%. Chad, for example, has close to 29% and Nigeria has just over 25% of web usage coming form mobile phones.

Similarly, there is a disparity between mobile web usage across Asia, with countries like India and Bangladesh having about 15% mobile web usage.

Currently mobile makes up about 3.81% of web usage worldwide. But as many parts of the world do not have either the infrastructure for wired Internet nor access to other computer devices, mobile phones are the technology of choice.

And in most of these places, the phone of choice is Nokia. According to Royal Pingdom, "in every single one where mobile web usage makes up an unusually high share, Nokia's Symbian OS completely dominates. In some countries more than 90% of the mobile web traffic comes from Symbian phones." Android, iPhone, and Blackberry OS have very small market shares in many of these countries.

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.