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In preparation for the upcoming ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit , we're outlining the 10 leading trends of the Mobile Web in a 3-part series of posts. In Part 1 we explored 3 important design and development issues for the Mobile Web. Now in Part 2, we look at 4 classes of mobile applications that have become popular in 2010: geo-location , Internet of Things , Augmented Reality , and mobile social networking . We'll explore these and other trends with you at the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit , a 1-day event we're running on Friday 7 May, in Mountain View, California. That's the day after Web 2.0 Expo (2-6 May), so we hope you'll extend your trip to the West Coast to help us define the future of mobile! To be certain of getting a ticket, we invite you to register now . Sponsor Geo-location Services In January, RWW Co-Editor Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote that the era of Location-as-Platform has arrived . Using leading location mobile service Foursquare as an example, Marshall wrote that "the mobile location 'check-in' is fast becoming the hot new status message type online." He added that "it was only a matter of time until 'where you are' became a platform to build added value on top of just like 'who you know' has on social networking sites like Facebook." 'Where you are' is the new 'who you know'! The use cases for location data include showing nearby restaurants and ratings, mobile advertising, local news, events, and Wikipedia data about local buildings. That's impressive enough, but imagine the possibilities when you add data from sensors . As I wrote in January, one use case that should become reality soon is receiving a real-time update of traffic conditions via sensors embedded in the road. What else can we do using location as a platform? We'll discuss this in-depth at the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit . Internet of Things As well as sensor applications, there are other emerging applications for mobile that intersect with the Internet of Things trend. They include barcode scanning, using your phone as an RFID tag and reader, and using your phone as a proximity sensor. As we explained in January , as well as your mobile phone reading and acting on sensor data from real world objects, the phone may also be used as a sensor itself. For example the iPhone has a built-in accelerometer, which is basically a motion detector. This is used for game control and also for re-sizing your iPhone display from portrait to landscape. The iPhone also has a microphone (which can be used as a noise sensor), a proximity sensor, and an ambient light sensor. Barcode scanning and its applications is a fast growing market in the mobile world. The most popular form of 2D barcode is the QR Code (the QR stands for "Quick Response"), which became popular in Japan and is now gaining traction in the U.S. and other markets. There are many emerging opportunities to utilize sensor and RFID data, which again we will explore at the Mobile Summit on 7 May. Augmented Reality Augmented Reality has been one of the hottest trends in mobile for about a year now. ReadWriteWeb even created an extensive report about AR and its market and development opportunities. We think that AR offers a new marketing and product paradigm for a high impact, high value customer experience. More than 1,000 AR campaigns were kicked-off last year and we expect to see many more this year. In our report, we profiled key AR development companies, their campaigns as well as development lessons learned. In a recent post, Chris Cameron (the author of our AR report) noted that practical application is the golden ticket of Augmented Reality . As an example he pointed to the junaio iPhone application, which competes with Layar and Wikitude in the AR browser space. junaio recently announced that its formed a partnership with BART, San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit system, to bring live train data to the app. junaio takes advantage of the API provided by BART to not only place locations of nearby stations in a user's field of vision, but also estimate arrival time of trains at each station and display that live in real-time using AR. Mobile Social Networking A recent study from Ruder Finn revealed that more people are using the mobile web to socialize (91%) compared to the 79% of desktop users who do the same. ReadWriteWeb's Sarah Perez concluded that "the mobile phone is actually a better platform for social networking than the PC." The study found that during the 2.7 hours per day that people in the U.S. spend on the mobile web, 45% are posting comments on social networking sites, 43% are connecting with friends on social networking sites, 40% are sharing content with others and 38% are sharing photos. Sarah commented that it's no surprise to find that the rise of the mobile phone corresponds with the rise in Facebook's popularity, because "it has become a do-anywhere activity that captures people's attention whenever they have free time, instead of an activity that requires people make time for it." Sarah concluded that mobile social networking is an easier activity to participate in now that it's been unchained from the PC. This of course has big implications for entrepreneurs and application developers, which we will explore at the RWW Mobile Summit. In Part 3 of this series outlining 10 big trends in Mobile in 2010, we will look at Mobile Business trends. We'd love to discuss these and other mobile topics with you at our ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010 . See our announcement post for more details. If you're a company in the Mobile Internet market, you may be interested in becoming a sponsor for this event. Please contact our COO Sean Ammirati for more information about sponsor packages. And a big thank-you to our current event sponsors: CallFire , WorldMate , Alcatel-Lucent and Ipevo . Discuss

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Top 10 Mobile Trends of 2010, Part 2: Apps, Apps, Apps

Adobe is officially giving up on Apple. Or rather, Apple gave up on Adobe and Adobe is just now admitting it. In any event, the news is that Adobe's "Packager for iPhone," the bundled tool in Flash Professional that lets Flash developers leverage their existing skills to produce iPhone apps, shall be no more. The toolkit will still ship with Creative Suite 5 as planned, but no future development or investment is planned in this area - or so says Mike Chambers, the principal product manager for developer relations for Adobe's Flash platform, in a blog post on Tuesday. Sponsor Farewell, iPhone The announcement highlights the escalating tensions between the two companies, initially kicked off by Apple's decision to not allow Flash on their mobile devices, a line up which includes iPhone, iPod Touch and now, the iPad. More recently, Apple made changes to their software development kit license, the agreement developers sign prior to building mobile applications for Apple, that again seemed like a shot at Adobe more so than anyone else. It stated that developers could no longer use cross-platform compilers to develop for iPhone. They had to develop using native code. ("Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine.." it reads.) That change effectively killed Adobe's plans for its Flash-to-iPhone packager, a tool which would have allowed Flash developers to port their creations to Apple's platform. But is Adobe worried? Not really. In fact, they sound more angry than concerned. Especially if you read employee rants like Lee Brimelow's, an Adobe platform evangelist, who titled his diatribe* " Apple Slaps Developers in the Face ." *not officially endorsed by the company But even Chambers can't resist the opportunity to berate Apple as he makes the announcement on his blog. He writes, "..as developers for the iPhone have learned, if you want to develop for the iPhone you have to be prepared for Apple to reject or restrict your development at anytime, and for seemingly any reason." To some extent, he's right. Apple has also added language to the agreement that appears to ban non-Apple ad and analytics frameworks from the iPhone. (More on this later). Hello, Android But instead of continuing to take potshots at the Cupertino company, Adobe employees - in general - may be better off highlighting Adobe's plans for other platforms. Chambers gets to this himself, but slowly. Six or so paragraphs into the post, he hits on what may be the more important news: Adobe's new "BFF" is Google. "Android-based phones have been doing well," he says, and it's the understatement of the year. The truth is, the platform is growing like crazy. Only months ago, we were reporting the market share doubling for Android , plus how Android's Marketplace is rapidly becoming one of the fastest-growing app stores around and, more recently, the insane levels of growth in new Android apps with over 9,000 added in March alone. Chambers notes that Adobe is now working with Google to bring Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR 2.0 Android-based devices. The company plans to have Flash 10.1 ready for Android (and Palm and RIM) by the end of the first half of 2010. That's only months away. Discuss

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Adobe Gives up on Apple, Welcomes Android

Today, about 145 million Internet users in the U.S. use social web applications. In total, all of these users generate close to 500 billion online impressions on each other. According to a new report from Forrester Research , a mere 16% of online consumers generate a grand total of 80% of these peer-to-peer online impressions. Over 60% of all of these impressions come from Facebook. Sponsor Peer Influence Rivals Traditional Media As Forrester's Augie Ray and Josh Bernoff point out in this new report, 500 billion influence impressions about products on social networks, product ratings sites and blogs, comes close to rivaling other mass media outlets. Online ad impressions, for example, numbered around 2 trillion last year. Facebook is the venue for 62% of all of these influence impressions, followed by MySpace (18%), Twitter (10%) and LinkedIn (6%). Ratings and reviews make up 32% of these impressions, discussion forums account for 29%, blog comments for 24% and blog posts for 16%. As Forrester's analysts rightly note, it would be easy to dismiss Twitter, given that it only accounts for 10% of all of these influence impressions. These users, however, tend to be the "connected of the connected," which makes Twitter an ideal place to engage mass influencers. One caveat we would add here, however, is that it is hard to equate a post on Twitter or Facebook with actually impressions. Even though a user can have 1 million followers on Twitter, chances are that only a small number of these followers will actually see this message. It's also not clear how many users actually read blog comments and actively read ratings on sites like Amazon and Newegg. The study's authors acknowledge this in a footnote, but also note that they consider 500 billion impressions to be a conservative estimate. Who Are the Influencers? For marketers, of course, it is important to reach these 16% of mass influencers. Forrester divides these influencers into two groups: mass connectors , who maintain very large social networks, and mass mavens , who don't just maintain a large social network, but also have a strong desire to share their knowledge about a certain subject. On average, mass connectors tend to have a slightly higher household income ($98,100) than mass mavens ($89,000). These connectors are also slightly younger (32 vs. 38) and more likely to use the mobile Internet (55% vs. 46%). Discuss

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500 Billion Impressions: 16% of Users Generate Majority of Brand Impressions on Social Media Sites

In a little under 3 weeks time, we will host our second unconference: the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit . It's a 1-day event at the lovely Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California. In preparation for the RWW Mobile Summit, we're going to outline the 10 leading trends of the Mobile Web in a 3-part series of posts. We'll delve more into these trends with you at the Summit, because our unconferences are all about audience participation. In this, the first post, we'll outline 3 important design and development issues for the Mobile Web. Register now to discuss these and other topics at our unconference. The RWW Mobile Summit is being held on Friday 7 May, directly after the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco (2-6 May). Sponsor Native App and/or Browser Based? Just as businesses in the PC-based Web spent years in the 90's wondering if a desktop app or web browser based service was the best choice, in 2010 the same question applies to mobile phone applications . Organizations are asking themselves: should we build a native mobile phone app, or should we build a cross-platform browser-based mobile service? If they choose the former, which platform(s) do they focus on first? The choices include iPhone, Android, RIM, Palm, Windows Mobile and Symbian. In February, mobile search company Taptu released a detailed report showing that the future of the Mobile Web is likely to be dominated by cross-platform browser-based mobile web sites - rather than apps built specifically for iPhone, Android, or any other platform. The company estimated that there were 326,000 Mobile Touch Web sites worldwide at that time, compared to 148,000 iPhone apps in the App Store and 24,000 apps in the Android market. What's more, Taptu expects the browser-based mobile web market to grow much faster than the app market. One factor to consider is that both options, native app and browser site, still have something of a 'wild west' element to them. We can see evidence of this in the stand-off between Apple and Adobe over Flash on mobile phones. Apple's iPhone platform and its default mobile Safari browser do not run Adobe's Flash technology, despite Flash having an almost ubiquitous presence on desktop PCs. Apple has been pushing HTML5, the latest generation of the Web's mark-up language, as a replacement for much of the functionality in Flash. This battle is yet to be won - but it's not looking good for Adobe, because it's hard to bet against the next version of HTML. Privacy Location-based mobile apps have been a big trend in 2010 (we'll cover this in Part 2 of this series), but there are significant privacy implications for these apps. Sites like Foursquare, BrightKite and Gowalla encourage their users to "check-in" to places, so that their social network knows where they are at any given time. While these apps have privacy controls that allow you to (for example) send a check-in update to just a select group of friends, a lot of times the updates are sent to the entire network. In a recent analysis post, Sarah Perez asked: are location-based social networks privacy disasters waiting to happen? She added that many web and mobile apps are using location data now, including Google , Facebook and user review site Yelp . The privacy dangers were highlighted earlier this year by a social experiment called PleaseRobMe , which displaying aggregated real-time updates from Foursquare users who used the social sharing feature to broadcast their updates publicly on Twitter. Although PleaseRobMe has since been shuttered, the point they were trying to make still resonates: sharing your physical location with a public network is potentially dangerous. For more details, read our February review of the short-lived PleaseRobMe. Emerging Wireless Standards Think your smart phone is cool now? Wait till it gets RFID chips, then it'll truly be 'smart.' That's the promise of two emerging RFID-based mobile technologies called NFC and DASH7. NFC (Near Field Communication) holds great promise as an enabler of mobile payments. DASH7 is a wireless sensor networking standard that complements NFC; it will enable things like advanced location-based services, long-distance mobile advertising and mobile coupons. Both NFC and DASH7 may soon be a part of the mobile phone that you carry around everywhere. Nokia already deploys NFC, and Apple and Google are rumored to be working on NFC implementation. There are a group of other emerging mobile standards and technologies to look out for, such as WiMax, ZigBee and 4G. They all play an increasingly important part in the evolving Mobile ecosystem. In Part 2 of this series outlining 10 big trends in Mobile in 2010, we look at Next Generation Apps. We'd love to discuss these and other mobile topics with you at our ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010 . See our announcement post for more details. If you're a company in the Mobile Internet market, you may be interested in becoming a sponsor for this event. Please contact our COO Sean Ammirati for more information about sponsor packages. And a big thank-you to our current event sponsors: CallFire , WorldMate , Alcatel-Lucent and Ipevo . Discuss

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Top 10 Mobile Trends of 2010, Part 1: Design & Development

Facebook just announced via its Facebook profile that the ultra-lightweight version of its website, Facebook Lite , is no more. The site, which many (including us) called yet another Twitter imitation , had only been live since last September but now redirects to the main Facebook homepage. Sponsor Facebook's status update announcing the closure read as follows: Thanks to everyone who tried out Facebook Lite. We're no longer supporting it, but learned a lot from the test of a slimmed-down site. If you used Lite, you'll now be taken to the main Facebook.com site. The pared-down version of the social network was meant to serve dial-up users and those in third-world countries with slower connections. Facebook did announce another stripped down version of itself called Facebook Zero last February at the Mobile World Congress, but going to this site from a browser simply gets the message "Sorry, your carrier does not support zero.facebook.com." We've asked Facebook if any other alternative will be available for slow-connection and dial-up users, but did not receive a response by press time. Discuss

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Facebook Shutters Facebook Lite