It appears that not only does the mobile web have a future, the mobile web is the future.

The researchers said there are two major global trends driving up the data usage. One, obviously, is the increase in the number of data-ready handsets. Simply put, more handsets capable of browsing the web means more data usage. By 2014, there could be over 5 billion personal devices connecting to mobile networks and over 400 million of those devices may represent the only means of connecting to the Internet that some people will have.

However, it's important to note that in Cisco's study, they also counted laptop air cards as mobile Internet devices, so these numbers don't just speak to the proliferation of smartphones themselves, they speak to how we will increasingly be using cellular data networks to access the Web in the future.

The other major trend driving up the data traffic numbers is the consumption of mobile video content. By 2014, mobile video will account for 66% of all mobile data traffic worldwide. This represents a 66-fold increase from 2009, the highest of any mobile data application. This expected increase has been noticed by other studies, too. In September 2009, for example, U.K.-based research firm Coda reported that we'll be using 1.8 exabytes of video per month by 2017.

Another way to get a handle on the increase is to look at the average mobile broadband connection and how much data traffic it uses. Right now, the average connection uses 1.3 gigabytes per month - the equivalent of 650 MP3 music files. By 2014, the average connection will use 7 gigabytes of traffic per month or the equivalent of 3500 MP3's.

The Middle East and Africa will have the highest compounded annual growth rate (CAGR), with a rate of 133%. Following that region is Asia-Pacific (119% CAGR), and North America (117% CAGR). India will be the country with the highest CAGR - they'll be at 222%. China will follow with a 172% CAGR and South Africa will have a 156% CAGR.

These are just some of the highlights from Cisco's research. If you're interested in learning more, you can read through the entire report here.

Image credit: Toshiba netbook via Slashgear

Among the top five mobile platforms (RIM, Apple, Microsoft, Palm and Google), Palm lost the largest amount of market share in the last few months. Palm, the current number four, now owns 6.1% of the US mobile market (down from 8.3% in September). With Google's Android rapidly growing in popularity, it's only a matter of time before Google will overtake Palm in the United States.

As we reported in January, according to ChangeWave Research, a growing number of US consumers plans to buy an Android device in the next few months. In September, Android was still tied with Palm as the least-preferred mobile platform. Today, Palm remains in last place, with Android now being the second-most preferred platform - right behind Apple.

The Times spoke with Franz Och, head of Google's translation services, who said that this new service should be up and running and would "work reasonably well in a few years' time."

"Everyone has a different voice, accent and pitch," said Och. "But recognition should be effective with mobile phones because by nature they are personal to you."

Och is referring to the fact that the software would have the opportunity to learn your accent, dialect and general manner of speaking over time, becoming more accurate. But we can only imagine the difficulty of the task ahead, especially with languages such as Mandarin or Cantonese, which are tonally based. In Mandarin, for example, the word "ma" can have four different meanings according to the tone used. If the speaker uses the first tone, a constant high pitch, then the word means "mother". If they use the third tone, a dropping then rising pitch, however, the meaning changes to "horse".

The fun doesn't stop there, the Times article points out, as handling the vast number of accents and dialects is also an immense task. Much like the Web-based translation that Google does, though, the system would become more accurate over time, essentially learning from its experience.

We hope that one of the first things it learns is not to call our new Chinese friend's mother a horse.

Just as with location-based search suggestions, searching for businesses from your mobile phone will use your location to give you results closest to you. If you are looking for something at a different location, maybe where you'll be later in the day, just include that location and the results focus around that. Clicking on the number will automatically dial that number, ending the days of trying to remember the number or looking for a scrap piece of paper to jot it down on before switching away from the browser.

The feature will be present for all high-end mobile devices, such as the iPhone, Android and Palm Pre. Any device configured to use Google Voice will use that to make the call by default.

Now, could Google go ahead and come up with an app that settles the debate over what we're going to have on the pizza and who's actually going to make the call? That would be really neat.

A report today from the Mobile Data Association shows that, while texting is becoming increasingly popular in the United Kingdom, it is still lagging behind the U.S.

When we first saw the data, we weren't sure if we should be impressed or unenthusiastic, so we quickly ran the numbers. An October report put the US daily text message average at a jaw-dropping 4.1 billion messages. When adjusted for population, this comes out to just about 14 text messages per person per day. The UK average comes out to just over four text messages per person per day.

Texting seems like it might not have gotten to a critical mass quite yet over there, has it?

The study, which focused on 2,000 people over the age of 16 living in the UK, found, among other things, that only 10% of mobile phone owners access the Internet on a daily basis. How can this be and why?

Even the most basic phones offered these days have Internet capabilities, but the fact that people believe they don't is key. In actuality, of those questioned, nearly 90% had at least GPRS Internet connectivity. How can you lead a horse to water if the horse doesn't believe there's a path down to the stream?

In addition to this, cost and perceived usefulness are two of the biggest factors in keeping the mobile Web at bay. Over three quarters of respondents said that they thought it was too expensive to use, while 60% said that the effort necessary to learn how to use a smart phone wasn't worth it to them.

Who Is Using the Mobile Web?

A majority of mobile Internet users are young, affluent, urban-dwelling professionals. They are on average between the ages of 16 and 34, living in a city and making more than $65,000 a year. Nearly three quarters of daily users are professionals.

Unsurprisingly, one of the biggest drivers of mobile Internet use is social media - Web sites like Facebook and Twitter. For daily mobile-Internet users, 70% user their phones to access social networking sites.

Overall, the study seems to contrast the general hype around mobile Internet and serve as a gentle reminder that, while we may surround ourselves with the technologically affluent, this isn't yet the norm for the whole of society. There is a definite demographic that uses the Internet on their mobile phones and, outside of that, it remains a costly, unusable and unavailable option in the public's eyes.

Last month, Sprint also announced that it will offer Android devices in the near future, leaving AT&T as the only major wireless company in the US that doesn't offer an Android handset - though AT&T, of course, still holds the exclusive rights to the iPhone.

Taking on Apple

There can be no doubt that this partnership is aimed directly at Apple. Just a few days ago, Verizon launched a new advertising campaign that highlights the company's 3G network and spoofs Apple's "there's an app for that" campaign. While Verizon was always known for the quality of its network, though, it was never known for offering cutting-edge handsets - something that could now change.

During a teleconference after the announcement, both Verizon and Google stressed the fact that they want the phones to remain open. Apple, of course, makes no such promises and has regularly landed in hot water when it didn't allow certain apps like the Google Voice app into its store.

Big News for Android Developers

Android developers will surely be happy about this announcement. Verizon, after all, will bring millions of new customers to the Android platform and given that the company has no plans to make any changes to the Android Market, this will open up a large new market for Android apps. In this morning's teleconference, Verizon also noted that it will pre-load devices with applications from Google as well as third-party developers.

One of the main problems in the mobile industry today is fragmentation. There are thousands of different handsets out there and multiple mobile platforms to code for, too. Sometimes, mobile applications for the same platform - like the Blackberry, for instance - don't even work on all Blackberry devices, only on certain ones. That makes it challenging for both the developers who have to write the various versions of their mobile apps and for the mobile users who want to install applications on their phones.

In many cases, consumers don't even know the model number of their phone - they may know the brand, but only because it's etched into the top of their handset. So when they happen across a mobile application on the mobile web, they're stumped as to whether their device is supported.

With GetJar's new service, that confusion could be a thing of the past. By automatically identifying a consumer's handset, the mobile App Download Page can point the end user to the correct download automatically. And if their phone isn't supported, the page can redirect the user to another mobile webpage of the application developer's choosing.

Developers who sign up with GetJar can manage all their mobile applications from the Developer Site, where they can also track download and performance analytics, sign up to advertise on GetJar sites and partner networks, and integrate in-app ads within their mobile software. 

Future Plans

Facebook was one of the first companies to use the new service and photo-sharing website Photobucket will roll out their GetJar integration later this fall.

Next year, GetJar will also launch a new version of their mobile application store which is currently available only as a traditional website and a mobile-ready WAP site. The future version, which will feature some 50,000+ mobile apps from GetJar's catalog, will more closely mimic the iTunes App Store mobile experience as it will be accessed via an icon placed on mobile phones' homescreens. The company is currently working on establishing partnerships with mobile carriers in order to prepare for the store's launch.

The Indonesian mobile market has more than doubled in the last year and for a lot of users there, their mobile phones are the most important on-ramps to the Internet. As InMobi points out in its press release, strong competition among carriers has brought prices down and made mobile phones more affordable in the last year. While the BlackBerry is generally regarded as a business phone with a focus on email, it is currently beating the more web-centric iPhone in Indonesia when it comes to mobile web usage.

InMobi estimates that the average user in Indonesia generated 592 page views, while the global average is only about 250. About 80% of all the handsets sold in Indonesia are web-enabled - though most of them obviously don't give users access to the rich experience smartphones can offer.

As for BackBerry's lead in this market, it's important to note that AdMob's last metrics report from July (PDF) points out that both Apple and RIM only have a small share of the Indonesian handset market. BlackBerry currently holds the lead against Apple, though, and judging from InMobi's data, it looks like it also has the momentum to extend this lead.

From the announcement:

"We have been politely cautioned by Palm that any discussion of tethering during the Sprint exclusivity period (and perhaps beyond--we don't know yet) will probably cause Sprint to complain to Palm, and if that happened then Palm would be forced to react against the people running the IRC channel and this wiki. We want to retain a good relationship with Palm, hence we are not allowing discussion of tethering on the IRC channel, or in this wiki. Note that Sprint does not have a plan available for use with the Pre which allows tethering under the Terms Of Service. Once there is a version of the Pre available for a carrier that does allow tethering, or an unlocked GSM version, then we may be able to change this policy."

As Bill Ray points out in good coverage at the Register, developers grow frustrated when the hardware they've purchased can't be tinkered with to their hearts' content. Users certainly lose out when that's the case. Fortunately almost any control over hardware can be broken - but what do you do when the hardware vendor cracks down on conversation about open use of the technology around the web?

It certainly seems like a recipe for ill will between Palm and developers, but Google's Android team made a similar move when it pulled all tethering apps from the Android store this spring at partner T-Mobile's behest.

Mobile developer Jason Grigsby argues that it's not just about big bad carriers and revenue. "Carriers have a delicate balancing act between the desire for more data and services revenue and the fact that their networks can't handle huge increases in data usage," he told us. "Everything is a compromise in this space."

We're more sympathetic with consumers demanding more data and developers seeking to create wondrous new innovation on top of that increased flow of data and hardware than we are sympathetic with carriers struggling to fill and monetize that demand. We understand that telcoms have made huge investments already that they must recoup, but it sure seems like they have invested too little and are making too much money off of service that few consumers are satisfied with. Imagine if the electricity companies in this country were hated as much as the telcom carriers. They aren't, so we suspect it doesn't have to be this way.

With real-time live updating folders such as these, it's easy to imagine how any web site could take advantage of this feature. Live updating RSS feeds or top stories from your favorite news source? Yes! Real-time stock quotes or fantasy football updates? Sure! And that may only be the beginning...the potential is there to expand the technology into other applications, too. For example, a live-updating RSS reader.

Also, since Android apps can run in the background, a Live Folders-enabled application could display update-related info right on the phone's homescreen similar to how an email application displays the number of unread messages. In an Android RSS reader application, that information could be the number of unread news items, for example. For other applications, though, the technology could be used to change the icon itself for a more subtle type of notification. Anything's possible of course, but for now Android users will have to be content with the way Live Folders currently works. However, that's still pretty impressive.

According to Android Developer Joey Sochacki, the latest version of Cupcake is solid and he suspects that it could be ready for public consumption in only a matter of weeks if Google's Android team wanted to deploy it. Considering that there will be major announcements today surrounding an update to the iPhone software, Google may want to prepare to release something exciting of their own, too.

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Web Trends

The Next Node on the Net: Your Car!

A new radio system developed in Australia is transforming the vehicles on the street into nodes on a network. The technology, designed by scientists at the University of Southern Australia's Institute for Telecommunications Research, is an application called "Dedicated Short Range Communications" (DSRC). Using a combination of GPS and Wi-Fi, cars can communicate their location data to a central office, but it also enables them to communicate with each other.

Social Network Downtime in 2008: LinkedIn Up - Twitter Down

According to a new report (PDF) from uptime monitoring service Pingdom, Facebook and MySpace, the two largest players in the social networking market, had very little downtime in 2008. Twitter, whose iconic Fail Whale adorned the service far too often at the beginning of the year, got its act together and was only down for 12 minutes in December. LinkedIn, on the other hand, saw an increased rate of outages in the course of the year.

How to Reach Baby Boomers with Social Media

A new report from Forrester Research revealed some surprising information: apparently Baby Boomers aren't exactly the technology Luddites that people think they are. In fact, more than 60 percent of those in this generational group actively consume socially created content like blogs, videos, podcasts, and forums. What's more, the percentage of those participating is on the rise.

Vint Cerf: Despite Its Age, The Internet is Still Filled with Problems

Vint Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google and widely recognized as one of the "Fathers of the Internet", said that the issues facing the Internet today are as complex as they were pre-Internet. Speaking at the SMX Conference in Santa Clara, Cerf discussed his concerns about the current state of the Internet and gave us a glimpse into his hopes for its future.

Black Out Your Twitter Photo: NZ Copyright Law Protest Goes Viral

Social networks are making it increasingly easy to organize and propagate protests. One that caught our eye this week was the New Zealand Internet Blackout, which is using a variety of Internet services to protest against a new law in New Zealand - the Guilt Upon Accusation law 'Section 92A'. This law may have major implications for Internet users in NZ, because it calls for internet disconnection "based on accusations of copyright infringement without a trial and without any evidence held up to court scrutiny." This law is due to come into effect in New Zealand on February 28th. The Blackout is in force on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and various websites/blogs.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

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Jobwire

Who's Hiring in Tech? 2009 Numbers So Far

It may be dismal economic times, but some companies are continuing to make new hires in tech and new media. That's what we track on our Jobwire site and below you'll find aggregate hiring numbers for the first 6 weeks of the new year. We last covered aggregate stats in the middle of December and the new numbers are similar to what we saw then. IT and software companies are hiring more than anyone else, but marketing firms are now hiring more than publishing and social media companies, a switch since our last report.

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Web Products

Mobile News: Yahoo Mobile, Skype on Cell Phones, Second Android Phone, and More

This week, the mobile computing world revolved around the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Among some of the highlights were the announcement of the second Android phone, as well as Yahoo's new mobile initiative, and the announcement of a partnership between Nokia and Skype that will bring Skype's VOIP client to Nokia's high-end N97 phone.

Would You Pay $200 for an Android App? Android Market Preps Priced Applications

The Android Market was designed to be the one-stop shop for all G-1 users to download applications for their mobile handsets. As such, it had a great deal in common with the Apple iTunes App Store - save for one specific feature: the ability for developers to charge for their apps. Now, even that feature will be common between the two application stores as the Android Market prepares to release support for priced applications.

Yahoo! Search Turns 5, Has Tech to Show For It

It was 5 years ago today that Yahoo! stopped using Google to power its searches and started using its own search technology, the company wrote today in a blog post. Everyone knows that things aren't looking good for Yahoo! in business terms, and the company's search and advertising market shares look even worse. But you know what deserves some celebration on this 5th birthday? The search team's work on some really cool search related technologies.

Yahoo! Search Monkey, BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) and Delicious are three big wins for the Yahoo! search team - even if no one has yet figured out how to turn them into money. That's not the only reason why we're all here on the web is it? Isn't it largely for love of innovation? Yahoo! in general, including the search team, deserve applause for their embrace of innovation.

Facebook Launches Facebook Bill of Rights, Reverts to Previous Terms of Use

If you read any tech publication this week, you couldn't have helped but encounter the brouhaha over Facebook's revised Terms of Use. Now, Facebook has decided to return to its previous Terms - dated September 23, 2008 - until it can better determine how to proceed. To help ensure they don't make the same mistakes again, they've also started the "Facebook Bill of Rights," a Facebook group formed specifically to allow people "to give input and suggestions on Facebook's Terms of Use."

ATG Recommendations Aims to Predict Your Next Purchase

In this latest instalment in our series on recommendation engines, we looked at ATG - an e-commerce services vendor which, among other things, provides recommendations technology to retailers such as Tommy Hilfiger and BetterWorldBooks. ATG has a similar "blended" approach to recommendations as richrelevance, whom we profiled last week - in other words it uses a mix of personalization and wisdom of the crowds. ATG's current approach to recommendations is heavily influenced by a product it acquired in January 2008, CleverSet. We spoke to ATG this week, to find out more about their recommendations product and what makes it stand out in (what we're discovering) is a crowded market for recommendation technologies.

See other posts in ReadWriteWeb's special series on Recommendation Engines

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Enterprise

Don't Forget About Security on the PC

Security in the cloud is a hot topic. But when we interviewed Peter Bell, General Partner at Highland Capital Partners, he went out of his way to emphasize the need for security on the PC. He was "sticking to the script," as Highland has a number of investments in this area, which we'll review. Nevertheless, his basic point is valid. There is little point for the data centers that serve your SaaS applications to have excellent security if your PC leaks like a sieve. To all Mac-heads, good choice, but most people still use PCs!

Email us if you're interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb's Enterprise Channel.

SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

The new alliance wants to guide governments, NGOs, and mobile firms on how mobile technology can be used to help save lives.

Already, mobile technology is providing and augmenting healthcare initiatives throughout the world. In a recent study released by the UN and Vodafone titled, "mHealth for Development: The Opportunity of Mobile Technology for Healthcare in the Developing World," over 50 of these types of initiatives throughout 26 countries were discussed. The biggest adopters of mobile technology were India with 11 projects and South Africa and Uganda with 6 each.

• Sending mobile phone owners updates on diseases via SMS.
• Letting health workers in Uganda log data on mobile devices from the field.
• In South Africa, the SIMpill is a sensor-equipped pill bottle with a SIM card that informs doctors whether patients are taking their tuberculosis medicine.
• In Uganda, a multiple-choice quiz about HIV/AIDS was sent to 15,000 subscribers inviting them to answer questions and seek tests. Those who completed the quiz were given free airtime minutes. At the end of the quiz, a final SMS encouraged participants to go for voluntary testing. The number of people who did so increased from 1000 to 1400 over a 6-week period.
• In the Amazonas state of Brazil, health workers filled in surveys on their phones about the incidences of mosquito-borne dengue fever.
• In Mexico, a medical hotline called MedicallHome lets patients send medical questions via SMS.

The Power of Mobile Technology

But beyond just the altruistic aspects of mobile healthcare, the UN report also demonstrated to mobile operators how programs such as these could provide value to the industry. That, said UN/Vodafone Foundation Partnership head Claire Thwaites, was a crucial step since the industry, like many others today, stands at the edge of a downturn.

Because mobile technology is relatively cheap and easy to spread, it can connect the rural areas that desperately need healthcare with the large populations of doctors who live in the urban centers. For example, "in India," said Dan Warren, director of technology for the GSM Association, the umbrella organization that hosts the MWC, "there are 1m people that die each year purely because they can't get access to basic healthcare. The converse angle to that is that 80% of doctors live in cities, not serving the broader rural communities where 800 million people live."

Some Drawbacks

Using mobile technology is not a panacea for the world's health issues, though. Says Forrester analyst Elizabeth Boehm, one of the biggest issues with mobile healthcare is that "the people who are most in need of healthcare are usually more aged, so they don't use the mobile or they're not comfortable with it." This limits the use of mobile phones in public health information campaigns.

However, as the technology continues to spread throughout the world, it's easy to see how, over the course of time, phones could become a "doctor in your pocket" for the less fortunate citizens of our world.

Yahoo today announced a new, but as of yet unavailable version, of its Yahoo Mobile service. Yahoo Mobile will be released as a native app for the iPhone, as well as for smartphones from Nokia, RIM, Samsung, Sony, and Motorola. Yahoo Mobile will also work on all Windows Mobile phones. This will be a major upgrade to Yahoo's current mobile offerings and Yahoo Mobile will include all of Yahoo's key services like Yahoo Mail, News, Calendar, and Messenger. On every phone except for the iPhone, the Yahoo Mobile package will include Opera Mini and Yahoo Maps.

Second Android Phone

The HTC Magic is the second Android phone after the G1. The first reviews have been quite positive, though the HTC Magic is clearly also entering a very crowded field. Besides some general updates to the Android operating system, this new will also allow for video recording - a feature that is still missing from Apple's iPhone.

Skype on Nokia Phones

While consumers would clearly love to make VOIP calls from their cellphones, most device manufacturers have shied away this, as most network operators obviously want users to use their own network for calls. Today, however, Nokia and Skype announced a partnership that will bring Skype to Nokia's high-end N97 phone. Users will be able to make Skype calls when they are on a 3G or Wi-Fi network.

Yesterday, Sony also announced that it would integrate Skype into its Xperia X1 phone.

Bolt Browser

Today also saw the release of a new browser for mobile phones: the Bolt Browser. The developers claim that their browser, thanks to using data compression, can load pages significantly faster than any competing mobile browser. Opera made a similar claim last week when it unveiled its Opera Turbo service.

By default, Twe2 will send you an SMS whenever you receive a direct message or a reply. In order to finance this service, Twe2 appends a short ad to all of its SMS messages.

Twe2, whose developers are also responsible for the popular FriendDeck app, has added a number of interesting features to its service that Twitter itself never offered. You can, for example, use the service to receive a message whenever a certain keyword appears in your stream, and you can even use relatively complex search queries.

In order to keep your Twitter SMS stream manageable, Twe2 lets you set the notification frequency (up to 100 messages per hour), and you can also specify if you only want Twe2 to send you messages at specific times during the day or only on certain days of the week.

Thanks to these features, Twe2 is even an interesting service for those of us who live in countries where Twitter's own SMS service is still available. Twe2 also promises that users in the U.S. will get a few extra features in order to distinguish the service from Twitter's own SMS updates.

One problem with Twe2, however, is that the service doesn't have access to Twitter's firehose feed, so that it can often take a while before it notices a new message and forwards it to you.

OAuth Coming Soon

Twe2 was approved by Twitter to test the company's forthcoming support oAuth, though this is not available yet. For now, you still have to provide Twe2 with your Twitter login and password.

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