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  Half of Mobile Web Browsers Choose Wi-Fi
  Bango Inc, the leading mobile analytics and payment company, reports that at the start of 2011 Wi-Fi accounts for over 50% of mobile user connections to the internet. These latest Wi-Fi stats announced by Bango follows a report they published in February 2010, which highlighted that at the time 23% of mobile website visits connected thru Wi-Fi. The new Bango stats are derived from an analysis of connection methods it tracks through its payment and analytics platform. Bango believes that growing consumption of streamed media is driving users to look for fast network connectivity from Wi-Fi, allied to greater certainty over data costs. The increased adoption of smartphone devices and the popularity of tablets are among the factors behind the surge in Wi-Fi usage. Bango measured different connection methods over the months of December 2010 and January 2011 using its mobile analytics technology. This month-by-month analysis showed a sharp increase in the number of people connecting via Wi-Fi in January, which coincides with increased smartphone sales over the Holiday period.
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  Social Networking Will Push Mobile VoIP Users to Nearly 139 Million by 2014, Says In-Stat
  Now, nearly five years since mobile VoIP services were first introduced, it is on the cusp of moving beyond just an inexpensive alternative for making international calls to becoming an integrated component of unified social networking services, says In-Stat. The next several years are expected to be transformational as mobile operators and other associated players figure out how to respond to a forecast of nearly 139 million mobile VoIP users by 2014. "Mobile VoIP is gaining real market presence with usage rates climbing rapidly," says Amy Cravens, Market Analyst. "As it becomes further incorporated into other mobile apps, specifically social networking apps, the realm of potential use is expected to broaden. This has created a great deal of jockeying among mobile VoIP players trying to develop market share and mobile operators trying to determine the best response to this potentially disruptive service offering."
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  Apple Starts Blocking Apps That Allow Access to 3rd-Party Paid-for Content
  Apple is tightening its control over the apps that can be offered on its Apps Store to block services that allow access to 3rd-party content that has to be paid for outside the Apple environment. The move has hit Sony's iPhone based e-book reader application as it allowed users to read e-books purchased through Sony's own website. Apple told Sony that from now on, all in-app purchases would have to go through Apple, Steve Haber, president of Sony's digital reading division told the New York Times. Apple has blocked the Sony app from its apps store until that issue is resolved. The move could also affect other e-book reader applications, such as Amazon's Kindle if applied retrospectively. "It's the opposite of what we wanted to bring to the market," Mr. Haber said. "We always wanted to bring the content to as many devices as possible, not one device to one store." Apple came under pressure recently after it blocked methods developed by PayPal to allow one-click donations to charities. The company said all such payments had to go through a 3rd-party platform hosted on a separate website that could be linked to within the app, but not hosted directly by it.
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  Facebook CTO: 2011 is all about mobile and HTML5
  Facebook may be the most-downloaded free application on the iPhone, but today the company’s chief technology officer Bret Taylor seemed more excited about the opportunities offered by the mobile Web and HTML5. Taylor was speaking today at the Inside Social Apps InFocus conference in San Francisco (he’s pictured above at Facebook’s f8 conference last year), where he said that mobile will be the “primary focus” of the Facebook platform team this year. Facebook has said for a while now that it wants to be the “social layer” in all mobile applications, and while Taylor acknowledged that Facebook could still do more on that front, he highlighted improvements Facebook has made recently, particularly the single sign-on feature that it announced in November. Moving forward, Taylor said that Facebook has been feeling some pain in supporting so many different platforms. If the company wants to roll out a new feature, it has to add it on Facebook.com, across its various mobile and tablet websites, and across its multiple mobile applications. And if that’s a problem for Facebook, it’s also a problem for any other developer.
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  Foursquare Now Six Million Users Strong, Hit 381M Total Check-Ins In 2010
  Foursquare has just announced some staggering growth stats via an infographic today. The company said that it has now hit 6 million registered users, grew 3400 percent in terms of check-ins and saw a total of 381,576,305 check-ins in 2010. And it only took the location based social network a month and a half to add another million users. Foursquare’s largest event by check-ins was the Rally To Restore Sanity with 30,525 check-ins. The infographic also includes stats on post popular venues by category, and most popular brands on the network (MTV and Bravo are at the top of the list). At Le Web last December, co-founder Dennis Crowley announced that Foursquare is seeing 2 million check-ins per day and adding 25K new users a day. At that time, Crowley said that users split up geographically between 60% US and 40% international, with the average Foursquare user checks in 3-4 times day. And less than three weeks after launching a photo uploading feature, the network hit one million photos shared. Clearly, Facebook Places isn’t having much of an impact on Foursquare’s growth, which has accelerated even after Facebook’s debut of their competitor. New partners, features, and an all-round compelling product has no doubt helped Foursquare remain competitive. You can read Crowley’s commentary at today’s DLD conference in Munich here.
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