Mobile apps will be worth $17.5 billion by 2012, according to a GetJar study undertaken by Chetan Sharma Consulting.

The companies predict that mobile app downloads will grow from 7 billion downloads in 2009 to nearly 50 billion in 2012, a CAGR of 92 percent.

Mobile app sales will be greater than CD sales in 2012.

In North America, mobile app revenue will grow from about $2.1 billion in 2009 to around $6.7 billion in 2012. While Asia leads the world in downloaded apps, North America accounted for over 50 percent of app revenue in 2009.

The study forecasts that the biggest revenue generator in 2012 will be off-deck (not tied to carriers) paid-for apps. On-deck mobile apps sales accounted for 60 percent of revenues in 2009, but will fall to under 23 percent by 2012.

Advertising-based revenue models will more than double by 2012, rising from 2009’s 12 percent of revenue to 28 percent of revenue in 2012. The study also predicts that app prices will drop 29 percent from 2009’s average of $1.90 per app.

Currently, 27 percent of the world’s 5 billion mobile users subscribe to data plans. Penetration will reach 45 percent in three years, the study says, with North America expected to lead global data penetration at 60 percent.

While the amount of app stores more than quadrupled in 2009 from 8 to 38, GetJar predicts competition among app stores will be straight up Darwinian in the coming years.

“This report signifies a battle for survival of the fittest among app stores worldwide – with app revenue and growth opportunities growing significantly,” said Ilja Laurs, CEO and founder of GetJar.

“There is no way that this many app stores will survive in the long term and while the value of the global app economy is set to be astoundingly high by 2012, we think only a few app stores will share this revenue,” Laurs said.

Earlier this month, Anderson Analytics and the Marketing Executive Networking Group released a report (view here) conducted in January, 2010 on members’ marketing plans for this year. Two-thirds of executives are more optimistic about business opportunity than in 2009.

• More likely to increase market budget - planned increases rose from eleven percent in 2009 to 24 percent in 2010
• Less likely to reduce staff and more likely to hire incremental staff - keeping current staff reached 44 percent this year from 34 percent last year
• More likely to increase spending on innovation and R&D - 36 percent of executives in 2010, compared to 21 percent in 2009

The most important marketing concept for this year was “Marketing ROI,” which MENG members selected 58 percent of the time. This surpassed “Customer Satisfaction” at 49 percent and “Customer Retention” at 53 percent. These two concepts were the top two placed in both the 2009 and 2008 report, while Marketing ROI was number three last year and number six in 2008.

“Social Media” made the top ten list for the first time this year, selected by 42 percent of respondents.

Social Media is accepted as even more important now than ever, but is one of the buzz terms that marketers are most tired of hearing (placed number one at 29.1 percent). More specific frustrations with Web 2.0 terms focused more on social media, especially Twitter at number 2 (14.8 percent).

Other most oversaturated industry buzz words were Social networking (7.9 percent) and Web 2.0/3.0 (3.9 percent). “Web 2.0″ seems to be losing traction from its previous two years as number one term, giving way to the less vague Social Internet terms.

As for strategy, marketer budget still favors traditional marketing over online 55 percent versus 45 percent, with smaller companies edging more towards an even split in their budgets. Seventy percent of marketers are planning new social media initiatives in 2010.

A University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research study on Fortune 500 Companies social media usage show how the largest corporations of the United States use blogging and Twitter to create a public online presence. This study, "The Fortune 500 and Social Media: A Longitudinal Study of Blogging and Twitter Usage by America’s Largest Companies," was conducted by Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D. and Eric Mattson, CEO of Financial Insite.

Of the Fortune 500 of 2009, 22 percent of the corporations (108 altogether) had a public blog with a post in the last twelve months, their criteria for the analysis. In 2008, only 81 companies, or sixteen percent, had qualifying blogs. Of the top five this year, only three had blogs: Wal-Mart, Chevron and General Electric. The remaining two that did not are Exxon/Mobil and Conoco Philips.

The 108 corporations of 2009 represent a cross-section of the industries with the greatest blog presence. The distribution of these industries from the last two documented years follow (2008 vs 2009):

• Computer Software, Peripherals, Office Equipment: eight versus eleven
• Specialty Retail: four versus seven
• Telecommunications: five versus six
• Food Production, Services and Drug Stores: five versus six
• Commercial Banks: four versus five
• Insurance: four versus five
• Semiconductors: four versus five
• Motor Vehicle: four for both years
• Information Technology: three versus four

93 (86%) are linked directly to a corporate Twitter account, more than three times as many as members of the 2008 list. Many more of these corporations have Twitter accounts, but do not have a link from their blog to it. Either way, 173 (35 percent) have used the service for their corporation in the thirty days before the survey took place.

While the number of blogs from Fortune 500 corporations has risen from 2008 to 2009, they are much lower than the Inc. 500 numbers. While 22 percent of the Fortune 500 have qualifying blogs, 45 percent of the Inc. 500 do.

I count myself among the growing number of people who are dissatisfied with netbooks.

Wrist pain, poorly formatted and slowly loading web pages, sound so low that watching films just doesn’t work, lack of a DVD drive, the “Pez-dispenser” keyboard . . . all work to offset the device’s low price and portability.

Maybe consumers are starting to see this.

Fifty-five percent of consumers don’t view netbooks as viable replacements for a laptop, according to Pricegrabber.com (PDF). The main reason is the cramped computing area: fifty-four percent replied that this is the primary reason they wouldn’t replace their laptop with a netbook. The other major reasons are lack of a CD drive (50 percent) and minimal storage (49 percent).

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PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that 2010 U.S. technology sector deals will increase steadily, following the surge of activity in the second half of 2009.

That said, PwC does not expect a return to 2006-2007 levels.

Deals dropped 53 percent in 2009, valuing just under $36 billion – less than half of 2008’s $77 billion.

Most of last year’s activity occurred in the second half: 64 percent of the year’s volume and 85 percent of its value occurred in the final six months’ activity. Almost 50 percent of that activity happened in November and December.

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Recently it was revealed that the most popular password for online sites is ‘123456.’

Not exactly Dan Brown-level cryptography.

Even more eye-opening is that consumers aren’t even careful with the stuff that’s really vulnerable – their bank passwords.

Seventy-three percent of people reuse their bank passwords on other, non-financial, sites, according to online security firm Trusteer (PDF). Forty-seven percent use both their banking password and user ID on nonfinancial sites.

This just makes it too easy for criminals, who can hack into less-secure sites like email or social networks to get bank passwords or other sensitive information.

While some institutions try to increase users’ protection by choosing unique IDs for them, 42 percent of those users end up using that unique ID with at least one nonfinancial site. Sixty-five percent of users who create their own unique user name use that name on at least one nonfinancial site.

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Baby Boomers expect that technology will help them live longer and keep them better connected, according to several complementary studies. Socially speaking, this section of the population are cultivating their existing relationships and creating new ones at unique rates compared to other age groups.

“Creating and renewing personal connections online is the biggest draw for these boomers,” said Lisa E. Phillips, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, “Boomers and Social Media .” About 47 percent of baby boomers who use the Internet are members of a social network, she says. The contacts that they make on these networks include family, friends and colleagues.

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Disappointment and a little elation are proliferating after the release of Apple’s iPad. Hype and conjecture were clouds of flocculence preceding the release date, only to congeal into a giant iPhone. Looking forward to the coming reception by regular consumers, who will be the ones who will actually define this new device as a success or failure, begs the question: What do consumers really want from their technology?

The Philips Center for Health and Well-being released a study this month which asked US men and women what activities are made better by technology, as well as what features are of importance in the same.

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The latest study from the Nielsen company shows that social networking is becoming the number one activity on the Web in terms of time spent, averaging five-and-a-half hours per user per month in December 2009. It’s 82% more time than one year ago and is still growing. It’s interesting to note that the other biggest time-consuming activities on the web are blogs, IM and online gaming: these are all about connections between people. The growth of status updating (as 33% of social network users already update their status at least one time a week according to Forrester’s latest study) with Facebook and Twitter as stars will create a new web within the World Wide Web.

Two examples to confirm this evolution: the experiment “Behind closed doors on the Net,” led by French-Canadian radio journalists, should conclude the same thing: even if it’s not perfect, the new kind of interaction and sharing provided by social networking makes sense and can become a new level of knowledge and comprehension of the world. The second example is the latest moves by the two big players in search, Google and Microsoft, which signed agreements with Twitter and/or Facebook to integrate the feeds in their results and make money out of this new kind of data.

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I spend infinitely more time on social networks in 2009 than I did in 2008, as did most people, according to Nielsen.

Globally, time spent on social networks increased an average of 2.5 hours per month between December 2008 and December 2009, a growth of 82 percent year-over-year, the research firm announced last Friday.

In December of 2008, people spent an average of just under 3 hours and 4 minutes per month on social networks; in December 2009, the total time jumped to 5 hours and 35 minutes per month.

Obviously, Facebook accounts for most of this time, but it’s amazing to see that the amount of time spent on social networks since the days of static MySpace pages. Sixty-seven percent of global internet users visited Facebook last year, and those who use the site end up spending more than six hours per month on it.

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