Adobe and chip maker ARM will work together to bring Adobe Flash Player 10 and Adobe AIR to ARM powered mobile devices. They aim to enable more people to play fully-fledged Flash video on mobile devices by making the technology much less power intensive.

To date, Flash has consumed too much battery power to run efficiently on mobile devices. Consequently, most mobile users have used Flash Lite, a cut down version of Flash which is limited in terms of what users can play.

Adobe doesn’t plan to release the new technology until the second half of 2009, but will demonstrate Flash Player 10 during the Adobe MAX developer conference this week in San Francisco.

Source: Lidija Davis, “Flash 10 for Mobile Devices”, ReadWriteWeb, November 17, 2008

A survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project released in October 2008 indicates that families with a married couple and young children are more likely than other household types to have mobile phones and subscribe to the Internet.

Almost 90 percent of married-with-children households surveyed owned multiple mobile phones, with almost half owning three or more. And while 52 percent of all households in the U.S. have broadband Internet at home, around 67 percent of the families surveyed had broadband.

Source: eMarketer, “Online and Mobile Family Connections”, eMarketer, October 21, 2008

An ABI Research study reveals that more people are accessing social networks via mobile (cell) phones and devices.

Based on an online survey of 500 users conducted in the second quarter of 2008, ABI Research found that 46 percent of those who used social networks also accessed them via mobile phone.

Of those sites visited, the most popular two by far were MySpace (70 percent) and Facebook (67 percent). All other sites came in below 15 percent.

Source: Enid Burns, “Mobile Web Visitors Flock to Social Sites”, The ClickZ Network, October 7, 2008

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) estimates that there will be over four billion mobile subscribers worldwide by the end of the year.

Mobile telephone subscriptions have grown by around 24 percent per year between 2000 and 2008. According to the ITU, in 2000 12 percent of the world’s population had mobile (or ‘cell’) phones. At the start of this year, mobile penetration exceeded 50 percent, and is now expected to reach 61 percent by the end of the year.

Of course, ’subscriber’ does not necessarily equal ‘person’ so the ITU’s claims of global penetration may be somewhat exaggerated. Still, it’s impressive growth.

Source: Enid Burns, “Mobile Subscribers Increase Worldwide”, The ClickZ Network, October 2, 2008

We all know the drill. We’ve got to switch off our mobile phones when flying. Funny thing is, the apparent ‘interference with airplane navigation and communications systems’ is… not really true. Apparently, those safety issues have been resolved.

Meanwhile, in the United States, passengers on American Airlines can now use the Internet due to the implementation of Aircell technology… but are NOT allowed to use voice over IP (VoIP) services such as Skype.

Oh, I get it. It’s not because passengers’ mobile phones (or VoIP) will interfere with airplane safety… it’s because having all those people calling - and being called - on their phones is just ‘plane annoying’…

Source: Joe Sharkey, “Internet in the Sky: Surf but Don’t Call”, The New York Times, September 13, 2008

Good news for European mobile phone users: the European Union plans to introduce price controls to limit the costs of both sending short text messages (SMS) and accessing the Internet.

The European Union’s telecommunications minister, Viviane Reding, is proposing to cap retail roaming fees for text messages at 11 euro cents (16 U.S. cents) per message. This amounts to a 62 percent drop from the current average of 29 cents.

The European Union also proposes to halve the wholesale cost of using mobile phones to access the Internet. This would bring the average cost down to one euro per megabyte.

Source: Kevin O’Brien, “Europe Weighs Caps on Roaming Fees for Text Messages”, The New York Times, September 3, 2008

Based on reviewing both its own data and analyses performed by other research companies, eMarketer predicts that, worldwide, more than 800 million registered social network members will use their mobile phones to access social networks by 2012.

Source: eMarketer, “Mobile Social Networking Set for Growth”, eMarketer, September 4, 2008

Analysis by Tech Crunch indicates that Facebook and MySpace have failed to gain traction in Japan due to a failure to adapt to the local culture.

It’s not that the Japanese don’t like social networks. After all, Japan’s home grown social network, Mixi.jp has grown into a $1 billion-listed company. It’s more that they like a different kind of social network to the kind MySpace and Facebook have attempted to impose on them.

MySpace opened in Japan in 2006, three years after launching in the U.S. Facebook has followed with a rather poorly translated version of its site. Meanwhile, Mixi has become the dominant Japanese social network with barely any competition.

Tech Crunch believes that while Mixi has always been in sync with what its Japanese market wants, by their very nature MySpace and Facebook have, if anything, turned Japanese users AWAY.

For example, Facebook’s “selling point” of having its members use their real names and photos DETRACTS from its appeal to the Japanese, who traditionally value modesty, if not anonymity. And while MySpace and Facebook promote themselves as tools for people to make new friends and express or promote themselves, Mixi seems to be much preferred as a tool for communicating at a distance through diaries and communities, and NOT for making new friends or self-promotion.

On top of this, neither MySpace and Facebook are optimized for Japanese mobile handsets… a major omission in a market where most people access the Internet via their mobile phones.

Does it matter? Well, with an online advertising market worth an estimated $5.6 billion in 2007, Japan should hold huge appeal for foreign social networks. But, as with anything, it pays to provide a product or service that gives people what they want, which, in this case, means appreciating what Japanese social network users are looking for in a social network.

Source: Serkan Toto, “Taking social networks abroad - Why MySpace and Facebook are failing in Japan”, Tech Crunch, August 3, 2008