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

If you thought you used the Internet a lot… what about your kids?

eMarketer estimates that 82 percent of United States teenagers aged 12 to 17 and 43.5 percent of children aged 3 to 11 will use the Internet on a monthly basis in 2009. Meanwhile, Nielsen Online says that about 19 percent of active Internet users in July 2008—or 32.4 million people—were under age 18.

Meanwhile, teenagers are proving to be heavy mobile users too. Research by MultiMedia Intelligence found that there were 16 million mobile teens in the U.S. in 2007. That’s about two-thirds of all teenagers in the country. Further, Pew Internet & American Life Project and the College Board’s National Commission on Writing found that a greater percentage of U.S. teens have a mobile phone than own a PC.

Of course, it may be a moot point, given the gradual convergence of media technology.

Source: eMarketer, “Kids and Teens Are Always On”, eMarketer, November 17, 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