You just received an invitation from Apple.

Where are you headed, you ask? To the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, California this morning for the company’s annual September event and, presumably, new product/service roll out.

But here’s the catch. You’ll be able to attend from the comfort of wherever your nearest iDevice or Mac is located.

According to Apple, the company will broadcast its event online using Apple’s “industry-leading HTTP Live Streaming, which is based on open standards. Viewing requires either a Mac running Safari on Mac OS X version 10.6 Snow Leopard, an iPhone or iPod touch running iOS 3.0 or higher, or an iPad.”

The live broadcast will begin at 10:00 am PST and be available exclusively at www.apple.com.

Opera recently released its monthly State of the Mobile Web report for July, offering up in-depth insight into all facets of mobile Web usage worldwide.  As usual, this month’s report has some surprising data.

For July, Opera Mini saw increases in all three categories of growth including unique users, pages viewed and data consumed.  In all, 62.3 million people used Opera Mini in July, 29.6 billion pages were served and 4.1 petabytes of operator data were compressed.  Yes, that’s PETAbytes.

In terms of growth worldwide, Asia showed the most substantial gains.  From July 2009 to July 2010, pageviews in the top 10 countries in Southeast Asia increased by 238%, unique users increased by 205% and the amount of data transferred increased by 227%.

Continue Reading

It’s time again for Millennial Media’s monthly S.M.A.R.T. report for July.  This month’s special section details a survey conducted by InsightExpress that takes a look at mobile shopping behaviors as we approach the holiday shopping season.

First, the basic stats:  the US mobile Web increased by 1.67% from 77.4M to 78.7M users.  Millennial’s reach of the mobile Web continues to grow as well, from 62.9M to 64M unique users month-over-month to represent an 81% total reach.  Other quick highlights show advertisers continued to engage in a deeper mobile experience with consumers during the month of July, with over 13% incorporating rich media elements in their campaigns.

Continue Reading

Health care reform may be a particularly American concern, but mobile technology may offer improvements to patients’ lives that everyone could appreciate. In a new Issue Brief, the firm Deloitte says mobile devices like smart phones can help consumers enhance their own, taking certain costs out of the health care system.

Using electronic health records, and collecting information therein via cell phones or other personal portable devices, it may become possible to “analyze aggregate data to activate mobile, patient-specific output such as medication reminders, healthy habit tips and medical bill reminders,” according to Deloitte.

“The personal health record embedded in mobile communication devices (which Deloitte dubs “mPHR”) is the ‘killer app’ that may change the game for providers, consumers and payers,” Paul Keckley, Ph.D., executive director, Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, said in a release.  ”Considering that treating chronic disease accounts for more than 70 percent… of the total $2.4 trillion in health care spending in the United States, the business case for (health records in mobile phones) is solid for helping to reduce costs for managing chronic conditions, such as diabetes and obesity.”

Continue Reading

Numerous mobile content providers settled several class-action lawsuits today that stemmed from alleged unauthorized charges on users’ wireless bills.

Flycell, Glomobi, Mobilefunster, Thumbplay, WebAMG Holdings, Glispa and Motricity were all named in the lawsuits, and collectively put the cases to rest by agreeing to settlements in the amount of $9M and attorney’s fees of up to $1.85M.  In a press release on the subject, all companies were clear in saying that “each of the Defendants has denied any wrongful conduct, and the settlement is in no way a judgment or ruling by the Court that the Defendants did anything wrong.”

Continue Reading

Yesterday, we covered an in-depth report issued by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) regarding consumer choice in the wireless industry.  It wasn’t long before other industry groups responded to the report, including the CTIA and Public Knowledge, a D.C.-based public interest group working to “defend citizens’ rights in the emerging digital culture.”

First off, here’s what the CTIA had to say: “In finding that wireless consumers are seeing ‘lower prices and better coverage,’ today’s GAO report confirms what we’ve been saying for a long time – that the U.S. wireless industry is extremely competitive and continues to respond to increasing consumer demand by delivering real benefits for American consumers,” said CTIA President and CEO Steve Largent.  “It is significant that the GAO reports that the cost of wireless service in 2009, adjusted for inflation, is about 50 percent less than in 1999.  According to the GAO, that ‘illustrates consumers are getting more wireless service for lower costs than ten years ago.’  We agree with the GAO’s assessment that the price of voice, text and data are indicators of competition in today’s U.S. wireless industry.”

Continue Reading

The Government Accountability Office (GOA) today published an in-depth report on the wireless industry to analyze concerns over consumer choice in relation to the seemingly anti-competitive environment that’s been created by operator consolidation over the past decade.

More specifically, the report aimed to evaluate whether consumers are protected from harmful practices like early-termination fees and handset exclusivity arrangements, for example.  The comprehensive analysis included collecting and analyzing data and documents from a variety of government and private sources, as well as conducting case studies in both rural and urban areas and interviewing stakeholders representing consumers, local and state agencies.

Continue Reading