According to the most recent data made available, last year ended with iOS having secured a 52% market share of mobile web browsing.

Net Market Share reported Monday that Android – Google’s popular mobile operating system – significantly trails iOS with regard to leading mobile devices used to browse the mobile web.

As of December 2011, Android only controls a 16.2 percent market share of mobile web browsing. In second place behind Apple is Java ME with a 21.3 percent market share.

iOS reached a zenith in its market share during October 2011 with 61.5 percent. But despite having lost some ground in recent months, Apple still managed to close out 2011 well off the company’s 2011 market share low of 46.6 percent last February.

To read the full report from NetMarketShare, click here.

A majority of the growth will be attributed to search and display (banners, rich media and video) ad units, in addition to continued adoption of smartphones, tablets and mobile Web usage.  “Mobile advertising is no longer a question of ‘if’ but of ‘when,’” said Noah Elkin, principal analyst at eMarketer and author of the new report, ‘Mobile Advertising and Marketing: Moving to the Mainstream.’  “A key factor pushing mobile advertising toward the mainstream is that mobile web access is fast becoming more the norm than the exception.  This makes mobile a greater imperative than ever for marketers.”

As consumers continue to purchase smartphones and tablets in droves, eMarketer’s latest forecast is sharply higher than its previous projections.  Relative to the September 2010 forecast, mobile ad spending projections for 2011 through 2014 have been revised upward anywhere from 11% to 33% per year.  The research firm also projects that mobile display ad spending will overtake messaging to become the largest overall format in 2012.  Within the display category, rich media and video are growing the fastest as marketers seek to translate the desktop’s engaging brand experiences to smartphones and tablets.

“Consumers increasingly expect to communicate, network, browse and shop from a range of devices, and the growing sophistication of smart devices will only accelerate this trend,” said Elkin. “But whether consumers access the web from a PC or a mobile device will ultimately take a back seat to marketers’ ability to build campaigns that reach across channels and devices and focus on targeting specific actions.”

The new platform, dubbed “3Seventy Local,” is designed to bring enterprise-level mobile solutions — including targeted SMS messaging in addition to mobile Web and mobile app solutions — to smaller organizations at truly affordable price points.  The company realized a larger issue in that advanced mobile solutions have been largely out of reach to smaller organization due to cost.

With a dead-simple user interface, the new platform was designed to allow users to create advanced mobile campaigns in only a few short steps — allowing them to “compete in the mobile space within minutes,” according to the company.

We’ve seen many mobile platforms go to market with the goal of simplifying mobile campaign creation using multiple channels, but most fail in terms of user experience, pricing or lack of crucial features such as reporting.  3Seventy Local provides one of the most comprehensive solutions we’ve seen so far that’s targeted at the SMB market.

“We see many big brands and advertising agencies realizing the importance of a mobile strategy as consumers begin relying on mobile as their primary means of engagement,” said Carrie Chitsey, Founder and CEO of 3Seventy.  ”Until now, custom strategies and solutions were out of reach for many small businesses due to high cost or limited knowledge of mobile strategy.  We have built the technology to be very easy to use and we’ve developed industry templates, training tools, best practices and everything a small business needs to create and execute mobile solutions.  Our goal with this new product is to remove barriers, educate and help small businesses reach their goals.”

Monthly packages to access the new platform start at $64.95 per month, and the company is currently offering a free trial of the platform during its introductory phase.  In addition, new users can receive $50 off set up fees by entering discount code “SET50” at checkout through Friday, November 4, 2011.  Much more info can be found here.

Smartphone penetration recently hit 40% in the U.S., and people are using them to their full abilities.  While downloading apps and browsing the Web seem to be the most popular, surprisingly, neither are at the top of the list.  This infographic was created using data from the Pew Research Centers Internet & American Life Project, who’s recent report detailed a wide range of data points for the mobile ecosystem — many of which have been covered here on MMW.

The full infographic is embedded below.  How do you use your smartphone?

Source: Tatango Mass Text Messaging

The company completed its research by using a sample of over 56 million mobile impressions from devices where both apps and mobile Web browsing were supported.  The results show that while the mobile Web sees more traffic and unique users as opposed to native apps, the engagement is much higher with native mobile apps.  In looking at the survey respondents, 90.15% of all unique users used the mobile Web, while just 9.85% used apps.  The sum of all visits was similar, with the mobile Web seeing 81.66% of all respondents while apps saw just 18.34%.

In looking at mobile ad impressions, 65.39% were shown via the mobile Web while 34.61% came from mobile apps.  While these results clearly indicate a preference for the mobile Web in terms of sheer users, it can’t compete in terms of keeping users engaged.  CEM4Mobile broke down the time spent within a mobile app vs. the mobile Web on three leading mobile OSs — Android, Apple iOS and Symbian.  Here’s the breakdown:

These results fall in the line with the notion that mobile apps are popular right now, and will remain to be for the foreseeable future, simply because it’s what mobile users are most comfortable with and what brands and mobile developers have flocked to since the iPhone made mobile apps the “next big thing” in terms of mobile consumption.  As HTML5 grows in adoption, however, the shift to the mobile Web is inevitable.

“44 percent of total searches for last minute gifts and store locator terms will be from mobile devices this holiday season based on historical growth rates,” Google says, based on established patterns of mobile query growth in recent years.

Since 2009, mobile shopping “patterns” have seen two consistent and profound spikes. The first comes during Black Friday – the shopping bonanza that follows Thanksgiving – and the second is the weekend before the Christmas holiday.

According to Google’s data, mobile users who turn to their handsets for product and gift searches are among the shoppers most likely to actually buy something – either that which they are searching for or something very similar.

From Search Engine Land:

Citing data from a 2011 AdMob survey the company says that 65 percent of respondents answered “yes” to the following question: “Have you used your smartphone to find a business, and then made a purchase at that business-in-person?” But there’s lots of other data that validate the directional accuracy of this “mobile search-to-store” user pattern.

Consequently, Google is projecting that the 2011 holiday shopping season will be the most bustling on record for mobile search and mobile commerce.

The survey found that 35 percent of all U.S. adults own a smartphone, however looking at just mobile phone owners in the U.S., the number goes up to 42 percent.  Pew also found that 87 percent of smartphone owners go Online or get email and 68 percent do so daily.

Looking at the finding that more people prefer accessing Web content on their smartphones rather than PCs, Pew said the following about whether this 25 percent was driven by preference or necessity: “even among smartphone owners who use their phone as their main source of internet access, computer (i.e. laptop or desktop) ownership is quite prevalent.  Indeed, fully 84% of these individuals also have a desktop or laptop computer at home.”

Regardless of whether the data supporting this finding is skewed, it represents the obvious shift to mobile devices as the primary source to access the Web.  If these stats were to be believed, it would indicate that as many as 22 million Americans prefer the mobile Web over traditional browsing.  Personally, I don’t think we’ve hit the point where consumers prefer the mobile Web over the traditional Web.  Sure, the mobile Web is growing at a breakneck pace and smarpthones have gotten to a point where everything available on the traditional Web is available via mobile, but we’re still a long way away from seeing any concrete data on whether mobile has overtaken PCs.

What do you think?  Do you find yourself accessing the Web more from your smartphone than your PC?

In the United States alone, however, that percentage is even higher – 8.2%.

In terms of the most popular mobile devices American users browse the web with, the iPhone leads the pack with 2.9%. Android phones are next with 2.6%. The iPad claims 2.1%, and BlackBerry phones take all but 0.6%.

Although the iPad is widely used for digital content absorption and video gaming purposes, people are clearly using their iPads to browse the web, perhaps more than most industry analysts even realized ahead of today’s report.

Although the percentages discussed above appear minuscule, Stephen Shankland of CNET reminds us that small numbers conceal big populations.

“Fractions of a percent are small, but given how many millions of people use the Web, each tenth of a percent represents a vast number of people in absolute terms,” Shankland says.

To read more about the report and the falling fortunes of the desktop web browsers of the world, check out Shankland’s report courtesy of CNET.

For Hulu, however, the update couldn’t have been less complicated. Hulu simply removed the link that sent potential subscribers to its Web site. The move comes in accordance with Apple’s new policy, which effectively prohibits “apps that link to external mechanisms for purchases or subscriptions to be used in the app.”

From Hulu’s vantage point, of course, there are some disadvantages to this arrangement, says Peter Kafka of All Things Digital. “That means that the app can no longer function as an effective advertising tool for the video service, which is a bummer for Hulu (which is owned by Comcast’s NBC, Disney’s ABC and News Corp.’s Fox; News Corp. also owns this Web site). It’d be quite useful to offer a smattering of free content on the app, then encourage users who want more stuff to click through to Hulu.com to pony up $8 a month.”

Had Hulu not pulled the plug on the subscription portal made available through the App Store interface, Hulu would have been forced to share a a 30% portion of the subscription revenue with Apple.

Still, while the new rules aren’t most convenient for prospective Hulu subscribers with an iPad, Hulu is actively promoting how users can still easily sign up for the service on the iPhone or iPad Mobile Safari browser. Usernames and passwords can immediately be entered into the official Hulu Plus iPad application for access to the service.

Over the weekend, Mozilla’s Firefox for Android became the first mobile Web browser to offer the “Do Not Track” privacy feature. “Mozilla introduced ‘Do Not Track’ to give users more control over the way their browsing behavior is tracked and used online,” say the open-source software development gurus at Mozilla. “It enables users to tell websites if they prefer to opt-out of online behavioral tracking.”

Mozilla, which introduced Firefox 4 for Android just two months ago, is among the firs major labels in mobile browsing to take an unprovoked, aggressively proactive step toward giving users great authority over their location data – information that, at least to some mobile OS makers and most mobile advertisers, is worth its weight in gold.

Late last week, several US lawmakers, including prominent Senators John Kerry (D-Mass) and Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), issued their recommendations to Congress urging new laws that would offer greater protects to wireless subscribers.

“These devices are not really phones–they are miniature computers,” said Senate Rockefeller, chair of the Senate Commerce Committee. “The mobile marketplace is so new, and technology is moving so quickly that many consumers do not understand the privacy implications of their actions.”