Mobile

Mobile video consumption continues to rise sharply. Forty percent more Americans were watching video on smartphones and other mobile devices like tablets and iPads in 2010 versus 2009, according to the Nielsen Company.

According to a new study from ForeSee Results, the US edition of the Report on Mobile Shopping indicates that 33% of all survey respondents had accessed a retailer's website using a mobile phone (compared to 24% in 2009), and an additional 26% said that they plan to use their mobile phone to visit a company's website, mobile website, or mobile application in the future. In other words, more than half of all online shoppers are either already using or plan to use their phones for retail purposes.

Mobile ad network AdMob receives more than 2 billion ad requests per day -- more than quadrupling during the past 12 months, according to Google. The stats released Thursday suggest that more than 100 million unique Android and iOS devices requested an ad each month, nearly doubling during the past six.

It's beginning to look like Apple may have had a very, very merry Christmas. Not that it should surprise anyone given how many of their products were on year-end 'best-of' lists. But some data that has started to come in over the past few days points to Apple's Christmas surge once again being led by the mainstays: the iPhone and iPod touch.

Mobile applications are poised to explode as they make their way into entirely new environments, such as television and the connected home, according to IDC. It projects the number of mobile apps to reach 76.9 billion by 2014, from 10.9 billion this year. Worldwide mobile apps revenues will experience similar growth, surpassing $35 billion in 2014.

In many ways, the mobile device has become a mnemonic device - literally a tool to help us remember things. We might email information to ourselves, keep grocery lists on our mobiles, or performs a search to recall a fact. Increasingly, though, we simply take photos.

As tablets and phones with touch screens proliferate, more and more people are watching videos on mobile devices. But any website with video must decide which devices to support and encode their video to play on different phones and tablets.