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.

The New York Times’ Nick Bilton today broke the news that Facebook will be incorporating location-based updates into users’ news feeds beginning next month.

According to Bilton’s sources, the social networking site will debut the location-based service at next month’s f8 developer conference in San Francisco.

The battle of location-based services is supposed to be one of the highlights of next week’s South by Southwest (SXSW), where Foursquare famously got its first bit of major buzz last year. Now, along with duking it out among themselves, Foursquare, Gowalla and MyTown will have to take on the major players in social networking.

While Facebook’s move could definitely affect traffic to the other services, Bilton’s sources say that Facebook’s move is aimed not at other location-based social networks, but at Google’s local ads.

As far as Facebook goes, most of its audience are not early adopters, but have proven eager in the past to try out features culled from other services. One-quarter of Facebook users are already using the site on their mobile phones, so the user base for location-based social networking is already there. And since people are already logging in on the go, so there’s no extra steps required on their part.

Also built in is the market for any Facebook games that could be built on top of the technology.

While they’ve been getting a lot of buzz in geekier circles, location-based services have not yet caught on with mainstream users. As with Twitter last year, it’s only a matter of time before they do, and Facebook is perfectly positioned to bring location-based services to critical mass.

One of Facebook’s main strengths is that it acts as a clearinghouse for new social-networking technologies, so expect location-based services to accelerate in adoption when users of the one of the most powerful sites in the world start to play around with them.

Apple has patented technology to make the iPhone unlock doors. The iKey.

To unlock a door with the iKey, users would enter a PIN code and then wave the phone in front of an NFC reader installed next to the door. As an additional security layer, the phone itself would be used to identify the users.

According to the Telegraph, the technology will be included in the next generation of iPhones.

The iKey could be great way down the line, but as with anything NFC, there needs to be sufficient readers in the ecosystem to make something like this really work. With an ecosystem in place, though the iKey would be a wonderful convenience.

But until there’s any sort of ubiquity, one would imagine that users would have to have their keys with them anyway. Who wants to get locked out their house if their phone or battery dies?

The bigger news is that the patent gives clear-cut ideas of how Apple is incorporating NFC into its devices. Apple’s entry into the sector could really speed up adoption of the technology.

The facts that adoption is needed on both consumer and service ends, and that two components are required — enabled devices and dedicated readers –  pose the biggest challenge to the industry. So the fact that Apple is planning to incorporate it should be great news to NFC companies. Apple has a proven track record in changing ecosystems, and only one or two popular apps could be enough to accelerate consumer demand for NFC (or in fact create it).

The iKey patent also shows the iPhone communicating with computers, which is exciting to a lot of consumers, as streamlining the process of intra-device communication could definitely be streamlined.

In other Apple news, FBR Capital chip analyst Craig Berger has predicted that the Cupertino-based company will build 5 million iPads in the first half of 2010, saying that the rumored production delays were “a false alarm.”

Touchscreen shipments will double this year, according to Gartner. The analyst firm predicts that 362.7 million mobile touchscreen devices will ship in 2010, a 96.8 percent increase over 2009’s 184.3 million units

Gartner expects that by 2015 more than 80 percent of mobile devices in North America and Western Europe will be touchscreen. Globally, 58 percent of all devices will be touchscreen by that time.

What makes reading the mobile touchscreen market difficult to read right now is that great hypothetical on the horizon – the iPad.

If Apple’s tablet is a success – and all indicators are that it will be an enormous one – then touchscreen computing will accelerate exponentially, and will perhaps be the near-future of computing, as many people not named Bill Gates expect.

The belief is that the iPad will mainstream large-screen touchscreen computing like the iPhone did for phones. Don’t bet against Apple’s ability to change user habits and behavior. Granted, that change in behavior is less dramatic than would be the case with other disruptive devices, thanks to Apple’s marked skill in ‘incremental disruption.’

Apple’s iPad, which according to reports is having slight delays in production -  delays which could limit the amount of devices initially available, which would be great for Apple, getting it into the hands of early adopters and influencers while maintaining the buzz in the general public – is expected to ship between one and five million units this year.

It’s no secret that the future of computing is in mobile. The secret is that the change will happen faster than many people – and brands – think. Despite the success of smartphones and apps, more traditional companies, some of whom are still learning to trust the internet, are hesitant to lead their brand into that market.

But some companies expect mobile to become the primary computing platform by 2013.

Google’s Vice President of Global Ad Operations, John Herlihy, predicted yesterday that desktops will be dead in three years, killed by mobile devices.

“In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant. In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs,” Herlihy said at the Digital Landscapes conference in Ireland. “Mobile makes the world’s information universally accessible.”

Gen Y is rapidly adopting mobile banking, finds a study by Fiserv, a provider of financial technology solutions

As would be expected, Gen Y is already very comfortable with online banking. Forty-eight percent of Gen Y with a credit card signed up for that card online. Eighty percent used online banking in the last month, and most prefer to keep financial information on their computers rather than on paper.

When it comes to mobile banking, looking at Gen Y’s adoption of this relatively new sector shows just how bright its future will be.

One-third of Gen Y has used mobile banking in the last month, compared to only 11 percent of Baby Boomers (we wish Fiserv had compared populations slightly closer in age). Forty-three percent of Gen Y users plan on trying mobile banking in the next year.

While the most common form of mobile banking that Gen Y plans on using is checking balances (32 percent), a healthy 15 percent plan on receiving and paying bills via mobile. This represents more than 1.5 million Gen Y households.

Much of remainder of the study regards off-line stuff, but here are a few other findings that concern the Web:

Twenty-five percent of Gen Y relies on bank websites for information and 11 percent rely on financial forums for information, “indicating a growing importance for financial institutions to maintain and grow online communications,” according to the study.

Less than half of Gen Y trusts their financial institution, but they do recommend to others more than older generations do.

“Elevating their satisfaction rates can amplify referrals made within social networks,” according to the study.

Also interesting is that Gen Y seems to be trending away from credit cards and towards debit cards, and that overall, they are more responsible financially than older demographics.

In the location-based app space, Foursquare gets all the press. But Booyah’s MyTown, which launched as a free app for the iPhone in December 2009, already has three times as many users spending more than ten times as many minutes per day on it than Foursquare.

The reason for MyTown’s success is simple: made up of former members of Blizzard Entertainment (Diablo, Starcraft, World of Warcraft), Booyah brings a game-design savvy to the location-based space.

“We’re gamers,” Booyah CEO and co-founder Keith Lee said at Tuesday’s TechRader at Atelier. “We care most about engagement and retention.”

“The biggest problem right now, especially in the mobile space, it that you only have small pockets of time, small time spurts, because you’re waiting in line in Starbucks or you’re at the gate at the airport,” Lee said. “So the most important thing for us is to find ways to engage and retain users.”

On average, people spend five minutes on an iPhone app, Lee said, and after 30 days the average retention rate is around 2 percent. MyTown users, on the other hand, spend an average of 65 minutes per day on the app, and the retention rate is above 40 percent after 30 days.

Lee describes MyTown as a Farmville for mobile or a real-world Monopoly. Basically, it places an economy sim on top of location-awareness. You can buy locations, upgrade and rent them out to others, level up and look for power-ups.

“We’re bringing video games into the real world,” Lee said. “Our goal is to get people to level up in the real world.”

Do people want to level-grind in the real world, or are they content just becoming someplace’s mayor? The numbers tell the tale:

Foursquare has 300,000 users who use the service for 5 minutes a day; MyTown’s 1.1 million users — 150,000 new ones sign up each month — spend 65 minutes per day on the app, spending an average of 10-15 minutes on it every time they log in. MyTown has 3.5 million check-ins per day while Foursquare has 87,000.

Not only was growth seemingly easy, coming up with a revenue model was simple as well: “We take the playbook of the stuff on Facebook,” Lee said.

“Twenty percent of our users contribute about 80 percent of our revenue through in-app purchases and virtual goods,” Lee said.

The virtual goods could be especially successful, since the location-based aspect provided strong opportunity for brand engagement. When logging into MyTown while near H&M, for example, users might be offered an H&M-branded virtual item.

“The whole idea is that you can get completely branded virtual items that drop, that are part of the game,” Lee said.

Thirty to 40 million MyTown virtual goods are consumed each week.

MyTown’s biggest disadvantage is that, while Foursquare and Gowalla are available in over 30 countries, MyTown is currently available only in the US. Booyah, which  has raised $9.5 million in Series A and B funding from Kleiner Perkins, is currently working on entering the European market.

U.S. consumers are not ready for wallet phones, a study by Kansas State University marketing professor Esther Swilley concludes.

Survey respondents said they were hesitant to put sensitive financial information on mobile phones

“It was the risk that was involved, and people didn’t want to take the risk,” Swilley said.

Swilley concedes that, even if consumers do not want wallet phones right now, it might be a question of training them towards it.

“I think what’s going to happen for consumers to accept a wallet phone is that it’s going to have to go in stages,” Swilley said. “So now we have everybody’s telephone number on our phones. Next you will be doing airline tickets and things like that on your phone. Next thing you know, everything in your wallet is going to be on the phone.”

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Editor’s update: ABI Research contacted us. They have adjusted their predictions. “The 2015 forecast figure should be about 407 million, not 244 million.”

The number of mobile banking consumers is doubling every year, and ABI predicts that 244 407 million people worldwide — sixty-six million of them in North America — will be mobile banking customers in 2015.

“The global number of subscribers more than doubled between 2008 and 2009, and is expected to almost double again in 2010. This growth can be seen everywhere, but Asia – led by India – is pushing it particularly hard,” said ABI senior analyst Mark Beccue.

The obstacle to the adoption of mobile banking in North America and Europe is that most banks only offer the service to existing customers. As well, most North American and European consumers have access to computers and are in close proximity to physical branches, so mobile banking is not the necessity it is in other regions.

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Adobe Systems Incorporated announced Flash Platform advancements today including Adobe AIR for mobile devices. This will bring Flash support to Google’s mobile operating system, Android, this year.

Adobe AIR gives Web developers technologies to create Internet applications that work on the desktop and across multiple operating systems, and now that includes mobile OS. With this development, Adobe AIR apps can use the functionality unique to mobile hardware, such as "multi-touch, gesture inputs, accelerometer, geolocation and screen orientation."

According to the press release, Flash Platform and Adobe Creative Suite developers can now reuse app code between one mobile platform and another, such as between Android and the iPhone. This will be more efficient than the old workflow, by saving the currently necessary work of writing large amounts of new code.

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Microsoft wants Windows Phone 7 users to have it fast and fun. The new mobile operating system swaps static homescreen icons for "live tiles" - self-updating buttons that aim to speed up phone interactions. All Windows Phones will have a dedicated hardware Bing Button, another intended time-saving tool. The Bing screen has three search options - Local, Web and News - for specific and fast queries.

Themed hubs collect "related content from the Web, applications and services into a single view to simplify common tasks." These hubs are titled as follows: People, Pictures, Games, Music + Video, Marketplace, and Office.

These hubs are filled with intuitively relevant content - People provides live feeds from social networks, and a central updater for Facebook and Windows Live. Pictures shares images and video with social networks and connects with the Web and PC.

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