This week the Carnival of the Mobilists (COM) brings the best of mobile blogging to Volker Hirsch over at Volker on Mobile. Regular Mobilists - including Russell Buckley from MobHappy, Mark Jaffe from Mobile Mandala, Andy Favell from mobiThinking and WIP Jam -- submitted a thought-provoking selection of posts. How can/should brands monetize our passion? What happens when cloud computing shifts app development to...

MOBILE SEARCH WILL TAKE UP ALMOST 75 PERCENT OF THE MOBILE AD MARKET BY 2013, according to a recent report from Citibank. The report says that SMS ads currently represent 63 percent of mobile ad spending, but this will drop to 9 percent in four years; display ads are projected to increase 5 points to 18 percent. The report says mobile search currently makes up about a quarter of the mobile ad market. Overall, the...

U.S. MOBILE DATA REVENUES ROSE 31 PERCENT in the first half of 2009 compared to the previous year, according to trade group CTIA’s latest semi-annual industry survey. Data accounted for more than a quarter of all wireless service revenues, ringing up $19.4 billion in the first six months of the year. CTIA also says that 740 billion text messages went across U.S. operators’ networks in the timeframe, double the nu...

US MOBILE PENETRATION EDGES UP, says eMarketer, and will reach almost 97 percent in 2013. Meanwhile, they add a number of other stats pulled from other reports: in the first quarter of 2009, US mobile users sent an average of 486 texts per month and made 182 calls, with heavy use by 13- to 17-year-olds skewing the numbers up strongly. The firm adds that the mobile Internet audience in the U.S. is now a third o...

T-MOBILE CZECH STUDY SAYS SMS/MMS AD RESPONSE RATE 27 TIMES HIGHER THAN INTERNET BANNER CAMPAIGNS. The project confirmed the high response rates of SMS and MMS ads, based on campaigns from 22 advertisers, including Coca-Cola, Nestle, L'Oreal, Ford, Komercni banka and Eurolines. The most successful campaign had a response rate of almost 12 percent, while even the results of the least successful campaign were three ti...

SMARTPHONES ACCOUNTED FOR ALMOST THREE TIMES more usage than their relative market share, according to AdMob's April 2009 Mobile Metrics Report.The report compared usage of mobile websites to usage of HTML sites on mobile devices and found the relative usage of both to be highest on Apple and Android devices. The iPhone's OS had 8 percent of the smartphone market, yet generated 43 percent of mobile web requests and...