ReadWriteWeb

Between LAUNCH and DEMO, this last week has seen more than its fair share of startups. Among these companies, we've seen a number of DIY mobile app creation tools throw their hat into the ring and promise a world where getting your company into someone's hands is as simple as dragging and dropping a couple of buttons.

With all of these democratizing, empowering tools hitting the market, there's just one question - are we about to relive the era of <blink> tag text and marquee side-scrolling banner ads?

According to Web analytics firm StatCounter, the BlackBerry mobile operating system overtook Apple's iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) for the first time in November. In the U.S., Apple iOS devices accounted for 33% of Web traffic while Blackberry reached 34.3%.

What's going on here? Are BlackBerry users really doing more Web surfing?

Mobile browser maker Opera has released its latest report on the mobile Web and this time it's come to a conclusion you'll arrive at soon enough as the family gathers for the holidays and everyone under 30 has their nose buried in a mobile phone - "Generation Y chooses the mobile Web".

In fact, most 18-27 year-olds surveyed in the report user their mobile phones to browse the Web more often than a desktop or laptop. The report offers a number of telling statistics on where the world is headed and it all boils down to one word - mobile.

Computational engine Wolfram Alpha's Managing Director, Barak Berkovitz, talked about the data layer of the mobile Web at a session this afternoon at the Open Mobile Summit in San Francisco.

Like geo-data has done for location, Wolfram Alpha adds a new layer to the Web: a factual dimension. This will impact the Web's evolution, says Berkovitz.

Developers looking to reach the mobile audience (and who isn't these days?) have to determine which mobile platforms to code for, which ones to skip and how to approach the design for their mobile website itself.

But before even getting started, there's one question many small companies have to face: which do you build first? Do you build the mobile website before or after building a mobile application, be it for Android, iPhone, Blackberry or whatever platform you want to reach? Or would you be better off starting with an app?

Is your company still in the early stages of establishing a mobile strategy? If so, you're not alone, at least according to a recent survey published by Forrester Research.

In a report titled How Mature Is Your Mobile Strategy, Forrester shares its findings that 45% of companies surveyed are "just beginning to work on a strategy" while 12% of respondents don't have one yet. Another 32% said they've had a mobile strategy in place for at least a year.

This weekend, at the Boston jQuery conference, the alpha release of jQuery Mobile went live. As the name implies, the project is a user interface framework for mobile devices built on top of jQuery, the most popular JavaScript library used today. With jQuery Mobile, developers can write applications for a number of mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets.

Although still very experimental in its current state, the new technology may have a major impact on mobile Web development going forward.

Consumers will have downloaded 25 billion mobile applications by 2015, a trend which prompted technology mag Wired to ponder in August if the open Web is dead. But don't be fooled by these reports, says Adobe. In its new mobile consumer study the company found that while apps are popular, people often prefer the mobile Web.

Analytics firm comScore has just released a new study on mobile usage and behavior in the Japanese, American and European markets. The report's findings highlighted the "significant differences" between the consumers in these markets, in terms of mobile connectivity, application usage, mobile social networking, media consumption, gender-related behavior and more.

Below is a summary of the firm's report.

Mobile browser maker Opera is out with its latest report on the state of the mobile Web, and this time, it's calling the growth "stunning." Since August of last year, the number of uniques has increased by 108.3%, page views by 143.2% and data traffic by 134.4%.