Ben A. Reitzes of Barclays Capital says that if Apple releases a device costing no more than $1,500, Apple could immediately claim roughly 5% of he HDTV market.

In doing so, Apple would generate first year product revenue of approximately $17 billion.

“Apple’s eventual television could be so much more than a TV — including gaming, video, communication, content delivery, apps, computing and all the capabilities of the current Apple TV — it is not really fair to compare it to products already available on the market,” Reitzes said Tuesday.

“It appears more and more likely that the company is actively engaging partners about a potential device and content,” he adds. “If Apple were to sell a TV, we continue to believe its margins and pricing could be industry leading given its vertical integration with content. We believe that Siri could be used as a groundbreaking interface for TV,which could be used as a content hub — glued together by iOS and iOS devices.”

Reitzes believes the long-awaited Apple HDTV will come after Apple enters fiscal 2013 this October.

Are you intrigued by the prospect of an Apple HDTV? Might it make your must-have list along with other Apple gadgets when it finally launches? Please weigh in with your two cents below.

According to published reports in the Financial Times, Facebook could launch its mobile advertising platform in early March.

Why the rush? Facebook clearly wants to illustrate to the investment community that it has established – or is in the process of establishing – viable and highly lucrative income streams.

The writing was on the wall for this platform based on the language Facebook used in its IPO filing last week.

“We currently do not show ads or directly generate any meaningful revenue from users accessing Facebook through our mobile products, but we believe that we may have potential future monetization opportunities such as the inclusion of sponsored stories in users’ mobile News Feeds,” Facebook revealed.

As of this writing, Facebook is planning to hold a marketing-related event in New York City on February 29th. Current plans call for Facebook to raise the curtain on its mobile ad platform at that time.

It also delivered a victory to food – tasty, delicious, and anything but healthy food, much of which was ordered by a mobile phone and delivered in time for the big game.

As MMW reported earlier Monday, mobile devices and corresponding social media platforms were very popular during the game, with Twitter generating more than 12,000 tweets per second during the final three minutes of the Super Bowl.

But mCommerce was also a huge success, estimates independent business analyst Mike Randazzo.

On Monday, Randazzo told Mobile Marketing Watch that the national pizza chains could report some interesting number in the days ahead.

“I would venture to guess that pizza chains saw a record number of orders placed online and via mobile devices,” he says, “possibily to a mind-blowing, record-shattering degree.”

“People were plugged into their mobile devices like never before on a day that, historically, tends to be very strong for pizza sales,” Randazzo concludes.

“This was the first year that the Super Bowl was live streamed, and there was a significant spike in searches related to Super Bowl live streaming on game day,” the Google Blog reads today. “Searches peaked at kickoff, and were made predominantly on desktop, followed by mobile phones and then tablets.”

Did you use your mobile phone to order food during yesterday’s Super Bowl? If so, please leave a comment – or some leftovers – below.

Analogous – at least in theory – to Twitter’s Promoted Tweets, Facebook may begin adding “featured stories” into people’s mobile feeds. What does this amount to? Marketing-led posts that could deliver invaluable opportunities to advertisers of every variety.

But Facebook has already denied the welcoming of any “rich media featured stories.”

“We want to clarify that we are not working with any agency to create paid ads on our mobile platform,” a spokesperson for Facebook said Monday.

Still, with its IPO on the horizon, Facebook clearly has a strategy to begin generating marketing dollars out of its 425-million active mobile user base.

What will the rumored mobile ad platform look like? For now, only hazzy comparrisons can be made. But by early March, Facebook’s “featured stories” may go live. And in the process, they may change the landscape of mobile marketing dramatically.

What do you think Facebook is planning? Please weigh in with a thought or comment below.

The study, which was conducted online by Harris Interactive last month, surveyed 1,428 U.S. adults who have mobile devices and plan to watch this year’s Super Bowl.

83 percent of viewers who plan to use their mobile device expect to use it as much or more than they did during last year’s Super Bowl.

What’s more, 30 percent of viewers under the age of 45 will be watching the game with their device in hand, and about half (47%) of all viewers age 18 and older say they expect to check or use their device up to 10 times during the game.

Veli’s analysis finds that the “second screen experience” afforded by mobile devices may be threatening the effectiveness of traditional – and expensive – TV ad campaigns.

During the famous, and sometimes infamous, halftime show, men are twice as likely as women (26% vs. 13%) to turn their attention to their mobile devices.

“This survey is indicative of how integrated the mobile device has become during the biggest television event of the year in the U.S.,” said Krishna Subramanian, Chief Marketing Officer of Velti. “Viewers are sitting in front of the television with a mobile device in their hand and they’ll likely check that ‘second’ screen often. There’s no going back now from the fact that the Super Bowl is truly a two-screen experience. Mobile is the second screen that completes the full circle of user engagement — turning advertising into content.”

What role – if any – will your mobile device play this weekend on Super Bowl Sunday?

Please weigh in with a thought or comment below.

According to the research gurus at NPD, global tablet shipments will reach 383.3 million units in 2017. Pushing the growth to new heights will be the buying appetite of tablet shoppers in emerging markets.

“The emerging market opportunity for tablets has been flying under the radar mainly because the device brands aren’t household names and there are concerns regarding the sustainability of the market,” says NPD Senior Analyst Richard Shim.

NPD finds that the emerging market tablet share of 36 percent in 2011 will be 46% within five years.

China and other Asia Pacific nations will remain huge buyers of tablets, but they won’t be outdone by the emerging markets in Brazil, India, Russia and other countries that want iPads and similar must-have tablets presently ubiquitous around the world.

Just two weeks ago, massive crowds outside of Beijing’s Apple Store caused Chinese police to deploy crowd-control measures to ease the iPhone 4S frenzy caused by the device’s long-anticipated arrival.

So unruly were Apple fans that the company was forced to strip the Aple Stores of their iPhone 4S unventory and revert back to selling the smartphones online only in China for the time being.

Not surprisingly, in response to the iPhone 4S frenzy, China is now seen as Apple’s next big market to conquer. In order to do so, says investment bank Morgan Stanley, Apple will all but certainly team with both China Telecom and China Mobile to make future generations of the iPhone available on all three Chinese carriers.

With such an eventuality likely before year’s end, Huberty predicts that some 40 million iPhones will be sold in China in 2013. That’s not bad, considering that Apple sold 68.5 million iPhones all around the world in 2011.

Huberty also believes that Apple’s Chinese ambitions will be greatly helped by the fact that the company’s sixth-generation iPhone may be compatible with China Mobile’s approaching 4G TD-LTE network.

“The deal,” the WSJ report reads, “could raise as much as $10 billion and value the social network between $75 billion and $100 billion.”

Sources “familiar” with the matter are quoted in the article but not named.

As of this writing, Facebook could file documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission within the next 48 hours. Executives for Facebook, however, are said to still be wavering about the timing of the decision, with it remaining a strong possibility that the filing won’t occur for a few more weeks.

In the big picture, Facebook is still believed to be targeting an IPO between April and June of this year.

Do you believe Facebook is going public as soon as the sources indicate? Please weigh in with a thought or comment below.

Fueled in large part by Google’s mobile search advertising business, the industry reached new heights in 2011 and 2012 is already shaping up to put 2011 to shame.

Aided greatly by the surge in smartphone ownership and the ubiquitous dominance of mobile ad networks – with Google’s AdMob, Apple’s iAd, and Millennial Media chief among them – new estimates from eMarketer place mobile advertising’s growth off the charts.

According to the latest projections, mobile advertising spending in the US approached $1.45 billion last year, which represents an 89% increase year-over-year.

US mobile ad spending for 2012 is expected to reach $2.61 billion.

“Right now there are many researchers out there looking at nearly the same empirical data about the mobile marketplace and drawing completely disparate conclusions,” says Noah Elkin, eMarketer principal analyst. “In order to form the most complete picture possible about the mobile ad market, we think it’s essential to evaluate multiple information sources-rather than a single dataset-especially as the market remains immature.”

Elkin, however, notes that Google remains the wildcard when it comes to estimating the mobile ad industry’s future growth. If Google grows faster than expected, so too will the industry.

eMarketer believes Google’s mobile ad revenues for 2011 represented about 51.7% of the entire industry’s revenue.

Fewer than twenty-hours removed from the company’s record quarterly earnings report, analysts viewing the cold, hard data say Apple has likely bumped Samsung out of the top spot by a sizable margin.

Last night, Apple revealed sales of 37 million iPhones in the last three months of 2011 alone.

Samsung is expected to announce later this week that it sold only 35 million handsets in comparison worldwide.

Although Samsung produces a wide array of devices and Apple makes only one smartphone – the iPhone – Samsung didn’t see any of its products reaching the level of intense popularity achieved by the iPhone 4S after it’s October introduction.

Nokia is yet to report its sales results but analysts are almost universally expecting the company to place a distant third from Apple and Samsung.