The company says it’s now processing more than one scan per second, compared to just 10 scans per minute a year ago.  What’s impressive is the numbers coming out of North America, where mobile barcodes have never quite caught on like in Japan and Europe.  ScanLife estimates that roughly 45 million people in North America have a code scanning app on their device today.  This is largely attributed to the surge is smartphone ownership, which is adding to a rise in usage of more advanced mobile functionality across the board.

Some other interesting stats from the report include the fact that scans come to ScanLife from over 125 countries each and every day, and 2D barcodes are now outpacing 1D barcodes — representing a major shift from 2010.  The report shows that 45,000 2D barcodes were generated from the ScanLife platform in the second quarter, representing a 300% increase from the same time last year.  In addition, over 400,000 unique UPC codes on products were scanned by the ScanLife app in a single month and the number of females scanning barcodes increased 13%, which shows the continued trend towards mainstream success.

The full report is available for download here.

According to the data, mobile virtual goods accounted for 80 percent of revenue from iOS apps in September, far outpacing advertising.  In fact, January, 2010 was the last month that advertising revenue was greater than virtual goods. Since then, it’s been nothing but micro-transactions of toys, coins, weapons and levels, just to name a few.  Flurry conducted the research using data from social networks and social gaming applications with a combined reach of 2.2 million daily active users.

Virtual good and social gaming in general have gotten wildly popular lately, with sales of virtual goods already representing the primary source of revenue for social gaming on Facebook.  Michael Pachter, Wedbush Morgan Securities video game analyst, reports that social gaming has grown from approximately $600 million in 2008 to $1 billion in 2009.   Further, he forecasts that social gaming will generate nearly $1.6 billion this year, and grow to more than $4 billion by 2013.

Users respond better to virtual good offers over advertising because its directly relevant to what they’re doing inside the app.  Still, it’s surprising that it generates such a substantial amount of revenue over mobile advertising.  I wonder when we’ll see a combination of the two?

While the concept has been around a while, marketers were unclear how to best leverage the technology.  As LBS apps continue to define advertising models and rewards programs based on location, options for marketers are becoming better defined as well.  “For a number of companies, especially ones with physical stores, the value in knowing a prospect’s location is the opportunity to drive that person to a store, and thus increase foot traffic,” said Neil Strother, research analyst at ABI Research, adding that the industry is now “seeing the first shoots” of location-based advertising being commercialized. “Once in store, the retailer has a high probability of converting that visit into a sale, which is the ultimate objective.”

The report noted that analyzing customers’ mobile and location habits is a good strategy for marketers to begin taking on location-based advertising, as well as determining which platforms are best for a particular brand.  Location-based advertising (LBA) is unique compared to other methods in that each campaign is highly targeted and relevant to a particular audience, meaning marketers need to take the time to plan and optimize for the best results.

“There is a value exchange between marketers and consumers that goes along with location-based advertising,” said Strother.  The consumer is asked to share his location via phone in exchange for something of value from the marketer, which could be information about a nearby store, a coupon or a special offer, he explained.

According to the report, players across the mobile value chain are seeking to emulate Apple’s success with the App Store by launching their own branded storefronts, such as the ‘Mobile Market’ from China Unicom, ‘Airtel App Central’ from Bharti and the ‘Apps & Games Shop’ on Vodafone 360.  The transition to an app-centric environment has also benefited more established storefronts such as GetJar, which passed 1 billion downloads earlier this month.

Interestingly, the report noted that “freemium” was becoming the prevalent business model, with publishers increasingly offering applications free at point of sale and subsequently monetizing them via in-app billing of subscription-based services, upgrades to premium content or micropayments for virtual items.  Still, the report offered caution to those seeking app store launches, saying they’d need to demonstrate sufficient scale to be able to induce developers to provide them with unique content.

“Apple has been able to achieve several billion downloads from a comparatively small handset base because customers are buying the iPhone for the apps,” noted report author Dr Windsor Holden.  ”That’s not been the case with other handsets.  So even if you have a subscriber base of tens of millions, your addressable market is a fraction of that – and spread across a variety of operating systems and handsets”.

The IAB fielded a simple survey to members who sell in-app ads, asking them to summarize the ad formats they currently support, across seven different platforms for mobile devices, including Android, Blackberry, iPhone/iPod Touch, iPad, Palm, Symbian and Windows Mobile.  Participating publishers in the survey included companies such as 4INFO, the Associated Press, CNN.com, Millennial Media and Pandora, just to name a few.

In terms of smartphone platforms, the IAB concluded that banner sizes are “most harmonious,” meaning the surest way to run a campaign across a majority of smartphone app platforms is to stick to the largest of the 6:1 Mobile Marketing Association mobile banner sizes, which is 300 x 50.  A majority of the participants in this survey support 300 x50 directly, and those that don’t generally have a size slightly larger where a 30 0x 50 will fit okay with black or white bars around it.

Interestingly, no publisher in the survey currently offers a landscape-oriented banner (for example, 480×75) for a smartphone app.  The IAB expects that landscape ads may start to appear as apps meant to be used in that mode grow more common.  Given that apps increasingly work in both portrait and landscape modes, the IAB speculates that one possible market evolution will be for in-app campaigns to design distinct and complementary portrait and landscape banners that run simultaneously.

The report includes much information and can be downloaded here.  It breaks down formats for each of the seven aforementioned platforms and even discusses emerging best practices for the industry.

The results thus far indicate budgets for mobile marketing spend is set to rise 124% from 2010 to 2011, putting the total allocation to the mobile channel at roughly 4% of overall marketing budgets.  Mobile as a marketing channel is up by the greatest single percentage, with “events and trade shows” the only other channel that’s projected to see growth in budget totals, surprisingly enough.

Looking at digital marketing budgets as a whole, budgets are expected to increase from nearly 30% to 32.3%, while television spending is only 15.4%, rising to a little more than 16 percent next year.  Other interesting results of the survey indicate outdoor marketing is projected to drop 25.8%, newspapers 25.5% and direct mail by 17.5%.  Marketers surveyed represent more than $2.3 billion spent on mobile media in 2010, and they say they’re allocating $5.5 billion next year.

The MMA indicates these key factors for the growth of mobile media budgets in the coming months:

• Smartphones other than the iPhone will experience greater adoption. Though the MMA grouped Android with Palm and Blackberry, the group still represents 86 percent adoption for 2011 compared with 77.5 percent for iPhone.
• But three other categories are expected to experience much sharper growth curves than either iPhone or Android. E-reader spending will jump from 2.5 percent to 18.75 percent; tablets from 22.5 percent to nearly 44 percent, and netbooks will rise from 6.25 percent to 20 percent.
• SMS and mobile Web sites are tied in adoption at 58 percent this year and 83 percent projections for next year, while mobile apps start from the same base and increase to 71 percent next year.
• Location based features are projected to have the largest increase among mobile tactics, up more than 265 percent, but – despite the earlier indicator that it’s even with mobile Web sites – SMS appears to be in for an increase of 141 percent in spending and mobile video for a 137 percent hike.

Russia has long been the top country in terms of Opera Mini users, but in May, Indonesia took the top spot.  Also in May, Nigeria surged ahead of Ukraine, South Africa and the United States, while South Africa also jumped ahead of the United States.  Interestingly, in all of the top 10 countries for Opera Mini usage, the prime time for browsing was at night — 8pm to midnight — which falls in line with other reports we’ve seen.

This month’s report focused on Latin America and its tendencies for mobile Web consumption.  Peru and Ecuador lead the top 10 countries of the region in terms of page-view growth (1,213.3% and 515.4%, respectively), while Colombia and Brazil lead the top 10 countries of the region in growth of unique users (322.4% and 303.6%, respectively).  Costa Rica leads the top 10 countries of the region in page views per user, with each user browsing 426 pages on average each month.

Opera Mini users in Latin America typically prefer Nokia and Sony Ericsson handsets.  However, Apple-iPhone-using Opera Mini users have made an impact in the region.  The iPhone shows up in all ten of the top 10 handset lists (for Latin America), and it’s among the top 5 handsets in 9 out of the 10 Latin American countries listed in the report.  As always, the actual report holds much more information, head on over and check it out for yourself.

The study also measures several key aspects of consumers’ use of the Internet, from media consumption patterns, to the degree of adoption of various digital behaviors, to involvement with online social networking.  Now in its second year, the Index has expanded to include 48 percent of the global online population, spanning France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, China, Japan and the United States.  In terms of mobile, the study found that marketers are overestimating what average everyday consumers know about the smartphones they use everyday.  Without educating consumers on the potential of new-age smartphones and other devices, the marketing potential will subsequently suffer.

As apps multiply and speeds increase, mobile users snap up smartphones — but realize only a fraction of their potential, the study suggests.  Although mobile Internet use is growing, a significant gap exists between the capabilities available to mobile phone users and the number of individuals who actually take advantage of them.  In an article on MarketingVox, the author covers a good example of this with eBay’s recent purchase of RedLaser, a mobile application that lets customers scan bar codes in order to list items faster or just compare prices.  For those who are tech savvy, use of the barcoding app will come naturally, but a majority of eBay’s users either don’t understand how the technology works, or is to set in their ways to try something new.

Campaigns that ran the first four weeks after the iPad launch delivered average interaction times across advertisers of 30 seconds, and as high as 53 seconds for one advertiser.  In addition, interaction rates — measuring the number of people tapping to expand and engaging with the ads, as a percentage of impressions — ranged from .9% to 1.5% in the first month of the campaign, up to 6 times the benchmark for comparable click-to-expand ads on the desktop.

More impressive was that 67% of users who viewed a video component of ads in the app watched it all the way through, compared to 53% completion rate for desktop.  ”These findings obviously show that the iPad can be a successful supplement to a 360-degree campaign across devices to strengthen and further lift audience engagement,” the release said.  It also serves as an early indication of what iAds may produce in terms of engagement and interaction.

As expected, Jobs showed up to show off the new iPhone Monday morning at the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

The 4th generation iPhone is packed with some 100 new features not presently available in any previous iPhone model. While Jobs only touched on a handful of new bells and whistles, the presentation was sufficient to excite the sold-out audience with forthcoming improvements to the juggernaut Apple smartphone.

On dsiplay at the WWDC, for example, were the iPhone’s newer, higher-res screen, an upgraded and bigger battery, 5MP camera with flash, a gyroscope for improved rotation sensitivity, video chat capabilities (via front facing camera), and a sturdier but 24% thinner frame.

The 4th-gen iPhone will go on sale June 24th with preorders starting June 15th. Available in both black and white, the iPhone 4 will retail for $199 for the 16GB model and $299 for the 32GB model.