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According to a study commissioned by mobile application store operator GetJar, the mobile application market will reach $17.5 billion by 2012. By then, the number of mobile application downloads will have also grown to nearly 50 billion from just over 7 billion in 2009. Although those numbers may seem high, they line up with other estimates, such as those previously reported by analysts at both Gartner and research2guidance.

New statistics about baby boomers' usage of the mobile web are here, and the news, sadly, is not surprising. This generation of users (ages 45 and older) has been slow to adopt mobile Internet technology. However, that's not to say they aren't getting on board with the mobile web revolution - they're just taking a little more time to get here than the other demographic groups surveyed.

Today, only 55% of boomers consider their mobile phone a necessity, a number which likely shocks younger generations whose attachment to their handheld device is so strong, they claim to "feel naked without it."

At the beginning of this year, analyst firm Gartner released a report that highlights eight up-and-coming mobile technologies which they predict will impact the mobile industry over the course of the next two years. According to Nick Jones, vice president and analyst at the firm, the technologies they've identified will evolve quickly and will likely pose issues that will have to be addressed by short term strategies.

A new study commissioned by the European Union has finally proven what many have suspected all along: internet users don't want to pay for content. Period. And nothing is going to change their minds. The report finds, in a surprising contradiction to what industry executives have been spouting for ages, consumers' behavior has nothing to do with the peer-to-peer technology (P2P) that has given rise to all-you-can-eat systems for free downloads of copyrighted content. In fact, many people claim that they wouldn't pay for online content even if all other free options were taken away. This finding has dramatic implications for the future of business, and not just in the entertainment industry, either. If people won't pay for content, how will companies survive?

According to a new report by Forrester Research's Sarah Rotman Epps, eBooks and eReaders are slowly but surely becoming mainstream. However, while Amazon is the current market leader among early adopters of this technology, Rotman Epps predicts that later adopters will not feel the same loyalty towards Amazon. This, according to the report, will open up a lot of opportunities for other players in the market, including Sony and large mass-market retailers like Walmart.

According to a new report from Forrester, the eBook and eReader market has now hit a point where it is ready to break out of its niche and become a mainstream phenomenon. In the report, Forrester's Sarah Rotman Epps argues that while early readers like the Rocket eBook in 1998 and the Sony Librié in 2004 failed to garner a large enough audience, today's consumers have embraced mobile, on-the-go media consumption thanks to the prevalence of MP3 players and handheld video games. Thanks to this, consumers are now also more likely to buy electronic goods than ever before.

Market research firm eMarketer released a new report today that examines how men behave differently than women online. Despite being a minority both in US population and online, men are still a large and often (according to the report) 'overlooked' segment of Internet users. The report stresses that gender informs online behavior more than other factors, such as race or ethnicity.

Some results of the study? Men visit more sites and stay online longer, use social networks as much or more than women and are more likely to access the Internet from a mobile device.

Ohio State University doctoral student and researcher Aryn Karpinski announced a study today indicating that students who use Facebook also have lower GPA scores and study less. The study got picked up by traditional news media sites like UPI and Fox News. A lot of the media reports (including Fox News') opportunistically called Facebook the culprit, which we believe the study doesn't seem to prove conclusively at all.

Analyst firm Gartner has just released a report that highlights eight up-and-coming mobile technologies which they predict will impact the mobile industry over the course of the next two years. According to Nick Jones, vice president and analyst at the firm, the technologies they've identified will evolve quickly and will likely pose issues that will have to be addressed by short term strategies.